Lion

"Lion" is the kind of prestige film I feel a bit bad for disliking. It's certainly very worthy, and for the first half an hour or so, is pretty good film-making, as young Sunny Pawar plays Saroo, a child whose world collapses when he accompanies his brother to a train station and loses him. Getting on a train, he finds himself in a part of India he doesn't know, not even being able to speak Behghali. Finally he ends up in an orphanage, where he is adopted by a Tasmanian couple. Twenty years later, while studying to be a hotel manager, he reconnects with his Indian past and his quest to find his real home begins...

Unfortunately, it's about where that quest begins that this film loses me a bit. I'm not sure if it's the leap from the vibrant Pawar to the somewhat more brooding Dev Patel, whether it's the somewhat aimless romantic subplot with Rooney Mara (who gets the worst version of the obligatory girlfriend plot, the "girlfriend is largely ignored because her man has something more important in his life that he doesn't want to share with her, but she'll accept it once he's solved it" one), or whether it's that a lot of the other subplots feel underpowered (Nicole Kidman basically has one Oscar-Scene-Speech but is otherwise doing a lot of polite nodding, while David Wenham gets less than that). The scenes of the search tend to boil down to one guy in a room doing a lot of googling, which is never particularly fascinating. And while the resolution, yes, is appropriately cathartic, it didn't make up for the slight tedium that had crept in for the previous 45 minutes or so.

This is not necessarily a bad movie, and for some people, they're going to buy into the search and the struggle for connectednesss more than I did. But for me this is an interesting concept and story that doesn't quite land emotionally.