Lion (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

1 hr & 58 min, color, 2016

“I’ve found home.”  Those words out of the mouth of a young twenty-five-year-old Indian man, Saroo (Dev Patel), come late in this inspiring true story but represent one of the final steps in the resolving of an extraordinary dilemma.  At age five Saroo (Sunny Pawar) finds himself lost in the dangerous and swarming streets of Calcutta, not knowing where he is or how far from mother and siblings and his poverty stricken surroundings he has come.  All he knows is the name of the dirty, remote village where they reside, one that nobody around him has ever heard of.  Little could he know that it would be a quarter of a century before contact with “home” is ever re-established.  What transpires in-between is an odyssey not only of distance but a powerful one of the human heart.

“I’ve found home!”  It has a clarion sound to it; three simple ordinary words, but somehow together they ring a beautiful bell, poetically rolling off the tongue of a young man who has been through an internal struggle that almost tears his life completely apart. 

“Lion” is based upon an autobiography, “A Long Way Home”, by this very person, Saroo Brierley.  This is one of those instances where the old bromide about fact sometimes being stranger than fiction earns its credibility and in huge terms.  The screenplay was composed by Luke Davies, and some delicate and fastidious directing is provided by Garth Davis.  But the story is more than strange; it is truly fabulous and relevant in a very significant way for everyone who has had identity crises and had to shoulder the challenge of making life altering decisions that conceivably could alienate them from persons they love.    

Saroo as a five-year-old is adopted by a wealthy Australian family named Brierley, under whose cultivation and rearing he grows to manhood and becomes a very gifted person.  His adoptive mother (Nicole Kidman) and adoptive father (David Wenham) truly love and cherish him, and by all appearances are destined to be the cradle of warmth and the source of stability and affection for the rest of Saroo’s existence.  He falls in love with a bright and caring young woman named Lucy (Rooney Mara), a fellow student, who returns the love and provides him additional undergirding.  But something is astir in Saroo’s mind and heart that threatens to derail him and his relationship with those he has come to love.  He knows, even though he has not shared the fact with his adoptive parents and friends, that there is another home somewhere in his native country, and what haunts him is the fact that he does not know if any or all of his native, biological family is still alive or, if alive, in the same location.  It is by pure happenstance that he gets misrouted from them and from the company of his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate).  How he deals with this conflict and the sense that he is living a lie, as comfortable as that living has become, is the deeply touching drama around which this film is centered.     

For some time he hides from his adoptive parents the fact that he is searching for clues to solve the mystery.  They are not aware that he even considers himself something other than an orphan, having hidden his early life in a cloak of secrecy.  He has an adoptive brother named Mantosh (Divian Ladwa), taken into the Brierley home at about the same time as Saroo, who has not matured as Saroo has and suffers from a spastic tendency to do bodily harm to himself.  Saroo’s secret breaks out into the open when he tells Mantosh that he is not a brother, a remark made in the presence of their parents that is flung at him in a tone of angry dismissal.  This jab throws Mantosh once again into an overt self-punishing fury.

But Saroo perseveres on.  He makes extensive use of modern digital maps in his search, but the task is extensive and painstaking.  All he has to go on is his recollection of what his early childhood surroundings looked like, since no one has ever heard of the town where he lived and cannot give him any hint or suggestive clue about even the direction in which he should search.  After all, how many of us humans remember life at the age of five in any great detail?  There is a map in his head, however vague, that he has to study and from many different angles.  In the meantime, he is put through a sense of cerebral and emotional conflict that threatens to drive him almost insane.

One person who especially suffers from his choice to locate the dim past is his adoptive mother.  And here is where the great gift of Nicole Kidman as an actress comes into play.  The woman has devoted her life to the dream of adopting orphan children and has had the great good fortune of marrying a man who shares that dream with her.  There is one scene in which her monologue fills us in on this; in stirring words she relives how she came to do what she has done, and she acts as if a thousand daggers have been driven through her heart to see where her venture has led her.  She has to watch as one adoptive son fails to build a life of his own other than as an angry, mentally unstable, bummed out straggler and the other one greatly gifted and intelligent but haunted by a past that she has never known he had until he reached adulthood.  She is not the picture of a complaining, abusive mother.  She is a person of obvious strength but deep caring whose caring heart has been deeply injured.  Kidman’s role is small but compelling, enough that she snagged an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress.  I think anyone training to be a professional performer would give time well spent to studying her work in this scene.     

Bringing joy and security into the life of a child other than one’s own biological offspring sounds exciting and promising, but one must come to terms with the fact that there is always risk involved.  There can be genetic factors or injuries at birth or repressed traumas that lie dormant until the child reaches a certain age or, as in Saroo’s case, cultural complications.  It is clear from the way Dev Patel portrays him that he suffers guilt over what appears to his sensitive mind to be desertion on his part.  Most adopted children never know who their biological parents are, but in Saroo’s case he knows quite well and the story of what became of the “deserted” family and how his disappearance from the home has impacted upon them can remain an emotional burden that might be grievous to carry around for life.   

Yes, he finds them, as is self-evident almost from the start.  The closing footage is handled with sensitive care and is paced and edited with great vitality and without heavy-handed or soapy distractions.  There is a sense of sustained rhythm that the flow of events never loses.  And we are rewarded in the closing credits with some insight into the culture from which the young man has descended.  The most fascinating disclosure is the derivation of Saroo’s name.  It is a Hindi word that translated means, not surprisingly, “lion”.  The name seems appropriate for him.  He is required by his life circumstances to go on the hunt and to follow his instincts as well as his intelligence in search of a desired, life-sustaining prize. 

The film is a warm and wonderful gift to all who care about the dispersed and the dispossessed.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Fences (Movie Review by Bob Racine

2 hrs & 18 min, color, 2016

What was the status of civil rights for minorities in the early 1950s in the U.S., long before the landmark legislation that was enacted over a decade later?   You get a sense of it in this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play by that prolific African American playwright August Wilson.  It was first staged in 1987.  It is set in a poverty row neighborhood in Pittsburgh and it spares no effort to disclose the fragility and festering though hidden wounds that keep a small struggling family just a baby step away from heartbreak and the collapse of love and personal loyalty.

Not that Wilson was out to make an encompassing socio-political statement – in this or any other of his ten plays, all with black characters and their settings in Pittsburgh.  He does not scan the length and breadth of anything; he just observes the human minutiae, the blades of grass, not the sprawling forest.  The two leading characters are Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) and his wife Rose (Viola Davis), two economically poor people in their fifties.  Both of them have had to confront, and are still confronting, disappointment.  Troy was a runaway from home at fourteen and a small time thief who spent fifteen years in prison before landing a job as a city garbage collector with no real future.  He fears that his two sons, Lyons (Russell Homesby), already an adult, and Cory (Jovan Adepo), seventeen, may follow in the path he has trod, and his fear impels him to treat them with overweening strictness – a strictness that leads eventually to mental and emotional abuse.  A quite charming fellow, until his sense of control is challenged!

Troy from early on has always dreamed of being a professional baseball player but was prevented from realizing that dream by the many years he spent behind bars.  By the time he got out he was already far into his thirties and no pro ball club was hiring black men to any great extent, especially one of his age and lack of training.  Jackie Robinson’s career was just getting off the ground.  He had to learn that trying for a career in sports was futile for him, and he demands that his sons develop a craft rather than go in that direction.  His clash with Cory, who has been presented with a chance to make a start in football, needing only his parents’ consent, is heartbreaking.  Troy refuses the consent, when Cory evades getting and keeping a job at an A&P. 

Rose is a more than decent woman, one who loves her sons and tries to protect them from the hardnose policies of their father.  Viola Davis brings her to vibrant life, a woman of deep and provocative feeling who, as she tells Troy in an especially stressful moment, has shared the same dumpy house with him in the same dumpy neighborhood for all the eighteen years they have been married.  “I had dreams too [that were never realized]!”  You know from hearing and studying her that her love for her husband is real, which makes his disclosure of infidelity exceedingly painful.

Troy has his moments of great insight and he knows how to make and keep a friendship with a fellow garbage collector named Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson).  The movie begins on the street on a Friday afternoon, when he and Bono are wrapping up their day’s work and when they settle into Troy’s backyard for lightweight conversation and good-humored exchange.  Bono is a short stocky man, very low keyed and good natured.  He makes appearances throughout the movie and becomes a kind of moral compass for Troy. 

The other key character is Gabriel, Troy’s brother (Myketi Williamson), a World War II veteran with a head injury from combat that today might be controllable but at that time condemned him to a state of arrested childlike development. He visits Troy and Rose intermittently, carrying a bugle wrapped over his shoulder, thinking that he is the Gabriel of Scripture that is supposed to blow his horn at the end of human history.  He walks around through the streets with a grinning face proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  Troy seems to have infinite love and tolerance for him and points to him as a casualty of the white race’s wars.  Gabe (as he is called for short) plays a very vital role during the closing moments of the story.

A good discussion question: How does Rose heal the rupturing that her husband has created, or does she, and what motivates her to make the sacrifice she chooses to make that closes off so many doors and opens so  many more?

Washington and Davis starred together on Broadway in a revival of “Fences” in 2010.  In this adaptation to the screen Denzel himself is the director of the show.  He joins a very minute club of motion picture persona who have dared to attempt the task of directing themselves.  Few have ever met with sterling success at this feat.  Orson Welles and Woody Allen still occupy a commanding lead.  Washington seems to have become the latest of them, though it is very difficult making pure cinema out of a highly theatrical piece of work.  As with the play, most all of the action takes place in the yard or the interior of the Maxson home. 

One factor that glares at us is the complete absence of drugs.  Today in a redominantly poor black neighborhood that would be highly unlikely.  Booze does play a part.  In fact, that turns out to be an Achilles Heel for this black man.  He can make with the words in great abundance, and his jolly demeanor makes him immediately charming, but he drinks too much.  One moment of drunken debauchery turns him into an emotionally lethal weapon in dealing with Cory, who has signed up for military service.  It is a signal moment of chosen and complete alienation. 

One noticeable failing of the film is the complete anonymity of Troy’s mistress.  Even if she is never seen or heard from in the play, there is no established protocol against bringing her to life in the screen adaptation.  For someone who becomes a wedge between husband and wife, greater attention should have been paid.  I suspect that Washington’s respect for August Wilson, one that borders on worship, may have elicited from him a fear of altering the supposed sanctity of the original text.

But the performances of all the cast are top grade and they boost the power and the poetry of the classic August work to give us a memorable experience.  I would walk many miles to see either of the two leads, Denzel or Viola, at work in anything. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.