Australian Movie Review - Lion

After years of living in this country, I might as well as remind myself of the country’s film industry to forget the pain of refugee crisis, climate ignorance, obvious racism and bushfires. I’m doing both a real-life drama and a romantic comedy, so let’s start with the former, Lion.

Lion comes to us from first-time feature director Garth Davis, who had previously done commercials and the TV show Top of the Lake, and tells the true story of Saroo, a boy who was lost while a child in India and put up for adoption in Australia. Later in life, he would use Google to find his way home to his biological family, while dealing with the complex issues of his own Australian life.

This movie to me feels like two distinct halves – the second half is your o.k. regular drama movie that’s pretty well-acted but not outstanding, while the first half in India is goddamn filmmaking perfection, of which I would not change a single frame. The second half is not terrible by any means, but the disparity between the two halves is definitely jarring to experience, even if I love this movie overall.

Let’s start with the first half, as you’d expect. In the scenes set in India, Saroo’s performer Sunny Pawar gives potentially the best child performance I’ve ever seen in a movie. He’s completely natural, lacking any sort of the pretension or over-the-top nature which typically plague child performers, and he far outstrips his adult counterparts later in the movie. Considering all the awards attention went to his co-stars instead of Pawar, I would not hesitate to call this one of the most underrated performances of the past few years.

Add to that the craggy, dirty and realistic camerawork combined with the beautifully washed out imagery provided by Grieg Fraser (Rogue One, Zero Dark Thirty), and every moment of the first half of Lion feels less like a Hollywood prestige picture and more like a surreptitious documentary. Lacking the heavily colour-saturated, artificial look of movies like Slumdog Millionaire or the charming silliness of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Lion always has the feel that every person on screen is in fact not an actor, but a real person.

Now let’s contrast with the second half. As I said, I do not think the second half is bad, but rather that its quality and power is lower than the first to the extent where it’s almost jarring. Switching the washed-out plains of India for the modern architecture of Melbourne, along with the Dickensian gut-punch realism for some more accessible and relatable drama, it was never going to match up, but perhaps increasing the visual grit or the emotional punch would have worked better.

While the first half had the tour-de-force that was Sunny Pawar, the second half has great, if not quite comparable to Pawar, performances from Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and David Wenham. Patel is always an actor I love seeing, and he does indeed bring his usual strong emotional core and a surprisingly good Australian accent, but compared with Pawar playing his younger version, he’s definitely not as good. Nicole Kidman is pretty exceptional in the movie, and while David Wenham’s and Rooney Mara’s roles are relatively limited, they still do pretty well.

I will say though, even though I think the second half is not as good as the first, I love the ending of the movie. It’s perfectly constructed and executed in every possible way, mainly because it goes back to the beautiful setting of the first half, but also because it packs on gut-punch after gut-punch of emotion without feeling like it’s trying to manipulate us. More directors doing biopics should watch Lion to get more ideas of how to end it right.

There are way more Australian movies out there that I could review, but I found this one so interesting because I felt it was the first time that I watched a movie that had such a weird shift between halves that I noticed. Regardless, I still think that this is a really good movie, and I’m going to give it an 8/10, or an A-.

Have you seen Lion? If so, what did you think of it? Leave your answers in the comments below.