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The Oscar Highlight of ‘Lion’ Is Not Dev Patel, It’s Sunny Pawar

Oscar nominee ‘Lion’ overwhelms with its performances and Sunny Pawar lingers on in our minds longer than Dev Patel.

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“Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.” ― Homer, The Odyssey

Is it too much to call Lion the modern day Odyssey? No, the great Homer wouldn’t mind, not even his majestic hero Odysseus. Lion, based on the remarkable true story of Saroo Brierley, might sound like a clickbait plot, but look closely and you’ll realise that his struggle and longing is no less than Odysseus’ yearning to get back to the place he called home.

Garth Davis’ Lion tells the epic tale of Saroo (Sunny Pawar) who lives with his elder brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), his mother (Priyanka Bose) and sister, in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. The family is poor, and Saroo helps Guddu in stealing coal from freight trains. But one fine day, while waiting for his brother at the railway station, Saroo boards a train and falls asleep in it, only to wake up to find it on its way somewhere. Saroo’s life thus becomes a plot of Dickens’ pen, landing him in faraway Calcutta, where an alien language and the claws of the begging mafia and child sex trade await.

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The world is deceitful and cruel, but Saroo is resourceful even in the face of a catastrophe. His little feet and smart mind save him from inconceivable brutality. If Odysseus fighting the sea-god Poseidon and monsters Polyphemus and Scylla made for a prodigious tale of adventure, Saroo’s voyage too has the echo of imagining the worst possible horror, and the joy of overcoming it without a scratch. Little Saroo runs, and with him, we fly with nerve-wracking excitement and whistle for our little hero.

Eventually, Saroo lands up at an orphanage and is adopted by an Australian couple, John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman). The story then skips several years, before Saroo returns to us, all grown-up as Dev Patel. He is a hotel management student in love with his American classmate Lucy (Rooney Mara). Despite his seemingly happy existence, he is haunted by images – of him running on gravel towards his real mother, of the lanes that led to his tiny house in ‘Ginestlay’, of the water tank at the station where fate snatched him away from his big brother. The sight and taste of jalebi overwhelms him with memories. Thus begins his journey of seeking his way back home, through the help of Google Earth.

With Sunny Pawar running the show on his little shoulders, the first half of Lion carries a certain emotional honesty, that we don’t really see much in today’s cynical undertakings. Pawar is a little package of wonder, playing a child that probably is his real self, blissfully unaware of the camera. Dev Patel playing Saroo’s older version, brings his finest performance to the table (a tremendous improvement over his Slumdog Millionaire role), minus any manipulative showboating or life-altering lines aimed at profundity. But somehow he still fails to achieve Pawar’s portrayal, that immerses the audience into his unforgiving misfortune. The problem perhaps lies with the film’s progression as a story.

Davis fashions his first half with the approach of a fairytale, rooted in the real world and real people. It achieves a certain larger-than-life aura, because it has enormous dramatic immensity, and you root for little Saroo incapacitating the hindrances to emerge triumphant. But Saroo’s grown-up life never really drowns us in the abyss of his crisis. His perturbed family life and the impediments of young love have very little in them to really push us into his well of loneliness. It holds us back.

If Davis keeps the first half simple, he turns the second half into a simplistic bit of storytelling, failing to create a full-blooded person of Saroo. Patel tries his best, but the foggy narrative wrings him down.

Despite this, Lion’s climax can dissolve you into water. You know the conclusion of the story, and yet when it turns up, it’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by it, maybe because it’s a real life story that has occurred in our world, not in the ingenuity of fiction. With Saroo, his mother and his sister, your eyes too, get swept away in a flood of tears. After all we are humans, always looking to come back home.

Homer lamented about Odysseus blaming gods for the troubles, but it was his own transgressions that brought suffering to the mythical hero. But little Saroo had no such disobedience at his disposal, yet fate took him away from his home, much like millions of other ill-fated children in our country. It’s quite a travesty that such an astonishing story of human spirit escaped Indian filmmakers, and it took an Australian director to bring it to life. Lion is the kind of story that can bring hope back, with uninhibited tears. Saroo is that hope, he is our Odysseus.

Oscar Buzz

After his BAFTA win, Dev Patel is riding high on Lion’s warm reception in Hollywood, and definitely cannot be counted out in the Oscar race. The strongest contenders in the Best Supporting Actor category are the season’s favourites- Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) and Hollywood royalty Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water). Adding to that, Lucas Hedges was simply phenomenal in Kenneth Lonergan’s grief-addled drama Manchester by the Sea. Year after year, Hollywood counts brilliant child performers out of the competition. Last year, it was Jacob Tremblay in Room, this year it is Sunny Pawar in Lion. Dev Patel’s nomination is a heady news for Indians, and he’d have millions of prayers with him on the awards night. But if Sunny Pawar had fetched this nomination, it would have been a fairer choice, and Pawar would have had a higher chance of winging it, considering his wide coverage in the American press. But the obvious fact is that he simply deserves it.

(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise; he tweets @RanjibMazumder)

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Topics:  Nicole Kidman   Dev Patel   Oscars 2017 

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