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Sunny Pawar in Lion.
Waking nightmare … Sunny Pawar as young Saroo in Lion. Photograph: Allstar/Screen Australia
Waking nightmare … Sunny Pawar as young Saroo in Lion. Photograph: Allstar/Screen Australia

Why Lion should win the best picture Oscar

This article is more than 7 years old

Continuing our series of Guardian writers’ picks for Academy Award glory, Dev Patel’s childhood-village hunt not only manages to make Google Earth dramatic, but packs in mighty tearjerking power, too

Everyone can empathise with Saroo. We’ve all, as children, felt that moment of panic when separated from our parents or an older sibling at a busy market or transit hub. (For me, it was a public pool.) And as adults we’ve all spent entire nights, eyes burning, click-click-clicking on the internet to find something we know we’ll eventually find, just another minute, it’s gonna be the next one, it’s gonna be the next one.

Of course for Saroo (played by Sunny Pawar as a child and Dev Patel as an adult) what’s at stake is much more life or death, but the universality of the underlying emotion, amplified to stratospheric levels, is what makes Lion such a striking film. I knew exactly what I was in for going into this picture, but still emerged a blubbery mess, humours gushing from my nasolacrimal ducts with tidal force. If this sort of intense, emotional connection isn’t what’s deserving of a little gold statue, then I don’t know what is.

Lion is a film split in two, every bit as much as its wounded lead character. The first and more urgent section is set in 1980s India, in which a five-year-old boy from a poor village ends up locked on an empty train. Days later, he’s spat out at the Kolkata railway station, alone, afraid and unable to speak the local language.

His street smarts kick in, and he avoids predators and perverts; until he’s whisked into the arms of adoptive parents, the street scenes have a patina of terror usually felt in a survival horror film. Even the relative calm of an orphanage is a waking nightmare, as Saroo is surrounded by psychologically damaged children and overtaxed social workers.

The oasis of Tasmania and wealthy parents (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) is only temporary. He seems to accept that his earlier, happy life is simply lost, and adapts to change far better than his adopted brother, another rescued Indian street kid. But eventually the hurt will come back with full force. “I’m lost,” Dev Patel’s older Saroo admits, tasting a jalebi at a party and experiencing a rush of memories that would make Marcel Proust blush.

Determination … Dev Patel follows his hunch in Lion. Photograph: Allstar/Screen Australia

Saroo can’t give up on reconnecting with his family, even though government agencies have told him it’s a lost cause. (There isn’t much information to go on and no one can seem to find his village. We’ll later find out he’s mispronouncing it. He was only five!) In the age of machines and this newfangled program called Google Earth, surely he can do something.

He has the image of the station and surrounding water tower burned in his mind, and a little math offers general, albeit vast, borders within which to search. Now all he needs is determination. Of course the more focused he becomes, the more he loses sight of his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) and his mother. This relationship is the most fascinating (ready those hankies!) as he must keep his project secret; he couldn’t bear to hurt her feelings.

All of this concludes in an cavalcade of bittersweet tears (the movie wouldn’t exist otherwise), and director Garth Davis doesn’t pull his punches when the big moments come. It isn’t just schmaltz, though. It takes a clarity of vision and tremendous ingenuity to make mouse-clicking cinematic. These are extended sequences of associative imagery, a rare stretch of non-verbal moviemaking for something so populist. The second half of the movie doesn’t strike the same chord of immediacy as the first, but it nicely mirrors early-20s angst with childhood anxiety.

Lion is a standout in this year’s Oscar picks for its lump-in-the-throat heft alone. Its closest cousin is probably Manchester by the Sea, but Kenneth Lonergan’s film (also marvellous) drifts with a family so battered by tragedy it can never reconnect. Lion doesn’t give up so easily.

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