MUCH may be said about Garth Davis’s filming of Saroo Brierley’s book “A Long Way Home”, screen adaptation by Luke Davies, but, as with every film, it’s up to film-goers to choose what that should be. 

When final nominations for the Oscars come out, “Lion” has a fair chance of being listed.  It presses useful buttons – emotion, grief, love, excitement, optimism, determination, generousity, danger, fear, visual beauty on two continents, to name a few. It is unlikely to win Best Film, which this year seems doomed to fall to a home-town favourite set in Hollywood despite competition from no-less-meritorious contestants no less American. 

“Lion” tells the story of Saroo, first seen in a Bengali slum aged five, living in poverty with a single mother, with older brother Guddu supporting the family by selling coal stolen from passing trains. Guddu told him to wait on the railway platform while he went off to find heavier work. Saroo fell asleep in an empty carriage, waking on a train bound for Kolkata, where he learned survival the hard way. His beauty and innocence put him at risk from sexual exploitation. Fortune smiled when Mrs Sood chose him for re-settlement in Tasmania where the well-off Brierley family adopted him and, later, a second boy. Twenty-five years later, Saroo, by now thoroughly Australianised, began to search for his birth mother.

Saroo’s life involves two significant periods – childhood in Bengal, adult-hood in Hobart. It introduces Lucy, a fictional girl-friend reportedly a combination of several. It gets a tad complicated explaining the intensity of Saroo’s search for where the train had begun its journey. The memory of a little boy can be scant after two intervening decades in a different country as part of a new but very loving family.

The grown-up cast is fine. Playing John and Sue Brierley gives David Wenham and Nicole Kidman relatively easy rides. Dev Patel makes a comfortable meal of the adult Saroo and Rooney Mara plays Lucy. 

The film’s star performance, however, comes from Sunny Pawar chosen from over 2000 aspirants to play five-year-old Saroo. Almost half of the film depends on him. He’s great, a little figure determined to survive, charming us in the process.

The film has no lions. Don’t leave the final credits too soon. There’s something you should see.

At all Cinemas