Lost & found

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This article was published 22/12/2016 (3377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Any number of movies currently playing in theatres, say Rogue One, Passengers or Assassin’s Creed, serve to demonstrate how computer technology has changed the landscape of movies.

But in the Australian drama Lion we see how technology has changed the plot of movies. In the film, an adaptation of a true story, tech helps a boy find his home after being “lost” for a quarter-century.

We get subtle intimations of how this happens right in the opening credits, which shows the dusty landscape of rural India from a godlike high vantage point.

https://youtu.be/ziOLGzKq6oo

From there, we focus on five-year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar, living up to his name), a fatherless child eking out a hardscrabble existence with the help of his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) and his devoted mother (Priyanka Bose).

Things go wrong for Saroo. He becomes separated from Guddu at a train station in Khandwa, and finds himself on a decommissioned passenger train that takes him 1,400 kilometres away to the east. His innate survival instincts keep him from the clutches of various urban predators, but he holds out hope of returning home until an orphanage matron tells him flat our that his mother has not answered ads placed in newspapers throughout India. Saroo makes his peace with the prospect of being adopted by an Australian family in Tasmania.

Flash-forward a couple of decades and the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) talks like any other Aussie bloke, he goes to school to study the hospitality industry, he has an American girlfriend (a rare non-doleful turn by Rooney Mara) and his future seems assured.

But on a visit to the home of a fellow Indian student, a simple Indian sweet triggers a memory of his old family that sends him on an obsessive quest to track his original home via Google Earth.

The quest comes at a cost, of course, not only with his girlfriend, but with his frail-seeming adoptive mother Sue (Nicole Kidman), whom Saroo fears will feel betrayed by his search for his first family.

First-time feature director Garth Davis shows a pretty sturdy grasp of difficult material. This is not a movie that becomes enmeshed in computer images, as Davis recognizes the drama is very much drawn in the human faces of these characters, as opposed to its digital landscapes.

Patel, best remembered from Slumdog Millionaire, shows a real, full-blooded star quality here, miles removed from the humble hero of that 2008 film.

Most impressive of all, though, is its underlying theme that runs counter to the usual Hollywood machine paranoia, where technology instead connects people, sometimes against impossible odds.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing