This new film, the Weinstein Company’s Oscar hopeful, is in a genre that I call “Life Affirmance”. Such films are usually based on the compelling experiences of real people, and are designed to connect to audiences on a deeply personal level. They nearly always end on an upbeat note, where some kind of triumph and vindication is achieved. They are popular because the audience has been given a vicarious experience, up-close, in which they feel as if they have actually shared in the very intense, and often painful ordeal of a person of appealing and (very important) non-threatening qualities. The Weinsteins saw that Saroo Brierly’s 2014  autobiography, A Long Way Home, had blockbuster potential for such a film, and they reportedly sank $12 million into the project. I think that was a steal.

The search for one’s lost family is a popular sub-genre of “Life Affirmance”, but rarely has it been explored so deeply as in Lion. Director Garth Davis and screenwriter Luke Davies were totally committed to telling the story primarily in visual terms, and that the music, which is nearly constant in a score by Dustin O’Halloran and Hauschka, would be nearly as prominent as the visual scheme.

The first part of the film, nearly half of its two hour length, depicts the harrowing ordeal of five-year old Saroo, played unforgettably by Sunny Pawar, who was eight at the time. It begins in 1986. Saroo lives lives with his mother, older brother, Guddu, and younger sister in the countryside in India. Their poverty is beyond belief. The mother carries rocks from a quarry, while Guddu takes Saroo with him while he does labor in the village, watching out for the boy as best he can. But Saroo becomes separated from him one day, and wanders onto a train that takes him nearly a thousand miles from his home. When finally released, he cannot find help because he is in a Bengali city, and he knows only a few words of Hindi. He cannot even tell people the name of his village. Eventually, after adventures of Dickensian peril, he finds protection with the authorities, who find adoptive parents for him. Saroo is told that he will be living with two strangers in a place called Tasmania.

Saroo’s terrifying journey is shown in short vivid scenes, with dialogue used sparingly, or not at all. Greig Fraser’s cinematography is incredibly vivid, especially in the scenes of the vast barren landscape. Saroo’s  confusion and terror are conveyed as through the eyes of a young child who has never been far from home. But his sharp instincts and intelligence are fully revealed in Sunny Pawar’s remarkable performance. The boy’s face tells the story. When, starving and disheveled, he is picked up by a woman outside her apartment building, washed, fed and given a bed to sleep in, it’s as if he has been delivered into paradise. But when a visitor tells him they will help him find his mother, we sense immediately that he doesn’t believe him.  At breakfast he says nothing, but, just from his expression, we know he will run away. His escape helps to define the main theme of the film: Saroo’s determination to reunite with his family will be the dominating force of his life.

It is with the second part of the film that the filmmakers make a crucial decision. With Saroo as a young adult, as played by Dev Patel, the narrative takes on a decidedly different turn. Saroo has lived with his adoptive parents in Tasmania for twenty years, and we are shown almost nothing of that experience. We have to accept Patel as the same person as that irresistible child who had seized our emotions. It doesn’t hurt that Dev Patel has somehow morphed into a Rock god. The audience is still going to have to accept him as the same character.

At first, the narrative seems to stray into a domestic drama about how orphans adjust, and whether Saroo can find a girlfriend. Patel is almost blithely dismissive of his past. He is studying hotel management, and has his eyes on material success. Slowly, after seeing how Google Earth can geographically locate any place in the world, he becomes intrigued, then obsessed with finding the village he was born in, where he believes his mother and brother still despair over his disappearance. In conversations with his girlfriend Lucy – a terrific Rooney Mara – he confronts this new direction in his life. In a crucial speech, he almost screams his despair at thinking of their pain at not knowing what happened to him. From then on, the film shows, in painstaking detail, how he and his family are eventually reunited. Rarely has a screen reunion had such an emotional impact.

But there is a narrative problem in getting there. His adoptive parents, Sue and John Brierly, played by Nicole Kidman and John Denham, don’t fit into a “classic” image of unselfish caregivers. Sue, especially, seems distressed and withdrawn. Saroo’s other adoptive sibling, Mantosh, is drug-abusive and prone to seizures. Saroo is distressed at his adoptive mother’s suffering, and blames Mantosh for it. Knowing this isn’t true, Sue decides to tell Saroo about herself. In a slow, somewhat meandering monologue, Kidman reveals her past; she tells of a lifelong desire to adopt “brown skinned” orphans, tracing it to a “vision” from childhood.

Unfortunately, the scene is a waste. Kidman is credible, but it only draws attention to the woman’s troubled emotional state, which may be delusional in origin. It raises questions that the film never answers, but we pay little attention because of the strength of the main narrative, which the film returns to quickly. Conversely, the scenes with Lucy are all strong and clearly focused on Saroo’s unwavering goal of finding his family.

One reason why we sustain our involvement is Patel’s deeply felt performance, which is never strained. But just as important are numerous and very quick,  imaginary scenes – some only a few frames in length – which show the adult Saroo in fantasized interactions with his younger self, as well as his mother and brother in India. This is risky and original filmmaking, but very skillfully done. What these scenes do is place Saroo in an intimate emotional relationship with his past, and establish the immediacy of his need for reconciliation with it.

There are many scenes of old trains in the film, puffing and meandering through towns and landscapes. But the film itself seems to have been designed as a sleek, powerful bullet-train that goes straight to our hearts.