Lion: A Tale of Two Halves

It's a tale of two halves for Best Picture nominee Lion. Though both halves work together to tell the true life story of Saroo, an India native who was separated from his family for almost three decades when he was just five years old, the first half represents more effective storytelling while the second is cluttered and unfocused.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, the actual story of the first half is simply more engaging on a primal level. It follows five-year-old Saroo as he learns to survive on the streets of an unfamiliar India a thousand miles away from home. It's impossible not to viscerally react as this helpless child narrowly avoids abduction attempts, starvation, and a myriad of other threats. What's more, Sunny Pawar gives the best performance in the film as young Saroo. He never has a disingenuous moment and it never clicks that you're actually watching a movie.

The first half also has the luxury of a more narrowed focus. There are no subplots at this point so the audience spends their entire time with Saroo while he's figuring out the world. When we are introduced to supporting characters, they are never around for long. It is obvious that Director Garth Davis (also nominated for Best Director) took advantage of this half to highlight his technical talents as a filmmaker. The gorgeous cinematography captures the grandeur of the mysterious, sometimes beautiful world Saroo is lost in. Infrequently does Davis rely upon close-ups to convey the harrowing sense of confusion that pervades the small protagonist's mind.

Once the story jumps ahead twenty years we are introduced to Dev Patel (who you may remember as the kid from Slumdog Millionaire, which was also nominated for and eventually won Best Picture back in 2008). He plays older Saroo, who now lives in Australia thanks to his adoptive parents and is determined to locate his Indian family. Unfortunately, this is where things begin to clutter up and slow down.

A multitude of prominent characters are introduced, including Rooney Mara as Saroo's love interest, Divian Ladwa as Sarro's adopted brother, and many more. With these news characters comes the introduction of new subplots that crowd the film. Saroo struggles to hold his romantic life together after his wife begins accusing him of spending more time on Google Earth than with her. There are also a couple mild confrontations with his troubled adopted brother over the heartache he often causes their Australian mother. All the while we get intermittent montages of Saroo researching possible locations of the hometown he cannot seem to recall.

While these storylines sound ripe with dramatic tension, Davis gets lost in his own execution. Large jumps in time are made without much of a heads-up and are used for excuses to further relationships between characters without actually spending a lot of time on them. So while each actor does solid work here, it gets tough to invest in these relationships because most of them are not truly earned.

These disingenuous subplots eventually overshadow the main through line for most of the second half. The focus shifts to Saroo's relationships with the new people in his life instead of trying to find his original family. The result is mostly moping around over a lot of moot conflict. The main plot becomes so enveloped that Saroo's reunion with his Indian family feels like a forced 10 minute tag on at the end and ultimately kills the spirit of its inevitable happy ending.

The contrasting quality of storytelling between the two halves, while not exactly night and day, is still the deciding factor in my final verdict: B-.