Lion by Garth Davis

Abstract

110 Lion. Dir. Garth Davis. The Weinstein Company, 2016. Film. Reviewed by Marina Fedosik Lion, directed by Garth Davis, is the adoption story of Saroo, a fiveyear -old Indian boy accidentally separated from his birth family and adopted by a Tasmanian couple, Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). As an adult, Saroo (Sunny Pawar as a child and Dev Patel as an adult) locates and reunites with his Indian family. The film is based on the memoir A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley with Luke Davies. Lion has been nominated for various awards, and the majority of its reviews have recognized this story of a lost-and-found child as a “feel-good crowd-pleaser,” a contemporary Odyssey with an emotionally satisfying happy ending (Debruge). Several critics, like A. O. Scott of The New York Times, concur that the emotionally charged film “succeeds without feeling too manipulative or maudlin.” And yet a significant number of reviews, Scott’s included, remain skeptical of the narrative’s sentimental thrust, which downplays the complexities of Saroo’s story but showcases evidence of the miraculous salvation and the happy reunion facilitated by Google.1 The critics, like Scott and likely the viewers— especially those involved with adoption—remain wishing for more texture in this representation of Saroo’s experience. Saroo’s journey begins when his poor but happy life with a mother and siblings is disrupted by an accident. He follows his older brother, Guddu, to yet another odd job that helps them provide for the family, but he is too exhausted to work after a long train ride. Guddu leaves sleeping Saroo on a bench at the train station while he goes off to work, but he never comes back to pick up his younger brother because, as we find out at the end of the film, Guddu is hit by a train that night. Disoriented, Saroo boards an out-of-service train that takes him to Calcutta—hundreds of miles away from home. He does not speak Bengali, nor does he know his mother’s name; he mispronounces the name of his hometown and his own name. In short, he cannot be helped, and no one seems willing to help a lonely child wandering through the indifferent crowds at the train station and streets of Calcutta. He becomes one of India’s lost children—one of the 80,000 gone missing every year, according to the film’s credits, which invite the viewer, albeit indirectly, to help such children. The link these credits establish between the adoption story and the discourse around disadvantaged Indian children is worth considering. Sonali Bhattacharya and Sguhasheesh Bhattacharya report that between 2008 and 2010, “a total of 117,480 children were reported missing, 111 Fedosik, Davis’s Lion 74,209 were traced and 41,546 remained untraced … a 32% increase in reported missing children in a span of seven years” (55). The gruesome portrayal of Saroo’s life on the streets and the dangers he is subjected to as a working child and a lost child is representative of the plight of those children. Lost, Saroo scavenges for food, drinks dirty water, sleeps on a piece of cardboard in a tunnel, and is hunted by the police. In what seems like a stroke of luck, he is picked up by a nice woman who seems to care about him, but she hands him over to a man who seems involved in sexual trafficking. We never know for sure if he is, but Saroo knows to run to avoid the fate of numerous Indian children who are sexually abused.2 Saroo is saved from life on the streets and in an orphanage by adoption.3 And this is where it becomes important to attend to the film’s understated complexities and avoid the convenient reading of the film as a narrative of salvation by adoption. The success story of Saroo may overshadow uncomfortable truths of adoption for a viewer who is not familiar with its nuances. The sentiment maintained in the viewer throughout is unmistakably that of a happy ending in the waiting: even though we see the protagonist suffer and battle his demons...