Film reviews round-up: Lion, Split, Goodfellas re-release

An Oscar contender starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman, M Night Shyamalan’s latest, and the return of a Scorsese classic

James McAvoy in M Night Shyamalan's film ‘Split’

Lion (PG)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Garth Davis, 118 mins, starring: Dev Patel, Sunny Pawar, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Aditya Roy Kapoor

Made by the team behind The King’s Speech, Lion is a film intended to put you through the emotional wringer. It’s a family melodrama, spanning continents and decades. At times, it is very moving indeed but it is also manipulative and predictable

The superb early, India-based scenes are the strongest. The filmmakers have found a wonderful child actor in Sunny Pawar to play the five-year-old Saroo, the Indian kid who becomes separated from his family in heart-rending circumstances. As played by Paward, he is a little warrior - a tough but mischievous artful dodger type with a doe-eyed expression that can’t help but bring out your maternal instincts.

Before calamity strikes, his days are spent foraging on the streets with his older brother, Guddu (Abhisek Bharate). Their mother spends her days working at the quarry, lifting rocks. It is never explained just why she is doing this or what happened to Saroo’s father. The family is poor but very close-knit. Early on, we see Saroo gazing in longing at the jalebi being fried by the street vendors. He dreams of eating these sweet delicacies and his brother promises that one day, they will buy some.

Director Garth Davis, making his first feature, brings an energy and lyricism evocative of Slumdog Millionaire to these early scenes. Dialogue is kept sparse. Saroo and Guddu are shown roaming around town. Saroo is desperate to prove that he can work. “I can lift anything,” he boasts as he strains to hold up a bike, looking like a pint-sized Mr Atlas. Then they make their fateful journey to the railway station.

There is a dream-like quality to the footage of Saroo becoming separated from his brother and somehow ending up on an empty train en route to Calcutta, 1600km away. In this strange city, he is utterly lost. He can’t speak the language. Even when he does find someone he can communicate with, he struggles to explain his predicament.

“What is the name of your mother?” he is asked at one stage. “Mum,” he ingenuously replies. There are the predictable scenes of the boy adrift in the big, bad city, preyed on by seemingly kindly ladies and their Bill Sikes-like associates or forced to flee when the authorities are rounding up street kids as if they're stray cats. All the time, he is thinking about home.

Lion plays at times like a realist version of The Wizard Of Oz. The difference here is that the Oz Saroo ends up in is Australia itself. Somehow, once he arrives there, the mist of forgetfulness comes over him. He is adopted by a kindly, childless, middle-aged couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). Another Indian boy, far more troubled than he is, also joins the family.

25 years pass in the blink of a title card and we are re-introduced to Saroo as a young adult, now played by Dev Patel. He is a charismatic, easygoing Aussie who loves cricket, dotes on his adoptive parents and plans to become a hotel manager. He has an American girlfriend (Rooney Mara in a role that barely tests her) and seems to have forgotten all about his Indian childhood.

Then comes the moment of Proustian epiphany. It isn't a Madeleine that transports him back in time but the sight of a jalebi, the delicacy he craved all those years ago, in a friend's fridge. From this moment onward, all he thinks about is his beloved birth mother. Thanks to the wonder of Google Earth and the diligent study of old railway manuals from the 1980s, he thinks he might be able to track her down.

Lion is so keen on building up to a big emotional climax that it leaves many questions unanswered. The backstory of Saroo's tormented adoptive brother is largely ignored. We are given little detail about Saroo's adoptive parents or how he managed to adjust so easily to his new life down under. Nicole Kidman excels as his Aussie mum, a slightly dowdy figure by comparison with Kidman's usual screen characters, but a kindly and empathetic one who feels her sons' torments and homesickness as if they are her own.

In its latter stages, Lion risks becoming extremely glib. The film is based on a true story. The real life characters are shown at the final credits and one assumes that the director and his screenwriters haven't taken too many liberties with their stories. Nonetheless, they're in such a rush to deliver their big emotional ending that they sweep any inconvenient distractions under the carpet. The tone of the film is overwhelmingly benign.

There may be heartbreak and death along the way but this is a film without any real villains or much of an exploration of cultural difference. Unlike his adoptive brother, Saroo is remarkably content in Australia. Dev Patel plays him as a happy-go-lucky type who gets along with just about everyone, whether down under or back in India. It seems strange that it takes a plate of food in a fridge to remind him of all that he has left behind and of the mother who has spent more than two decades searching for him.

In this story of a lost boy, most of the contradictions are ironed out. The film is moving enough in its own terms but lacks the depth and complexity that might have been expected.

Split (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir: M Night Shyamalan. 117 mins, starring: James McAvoy, Haley Lu Richardson, Anya Taylor-Joy

M Night Shyamalan ups the ante of the disassociatve identity disorder movie in his brazen new feature, Split. There were only Three Faces of Eve in the film of that name, but James McAvoy has a whopping 23 of them here. His character’s "real" name is Kevin but there are many other personalities lurking within him, all with their own physical tics, particular ways of speaking and temperaments. Some are benign but one or two are very nasty indeed. One disappointment in an initially gripping but ultimately absurd thriller is that we only meet seven or eight of them.

The film itself suffers from a certain identity disorder. Early on, Shyamalan pays lip service to the idea of psychological realism. There is a very chilling opening scene in which one of Kevin’s personalities kidnaps three young women in a car park, in the full light of day. They’re all utterly bewildered as to why they’ve been taken or what he plans to do with them. All they are able to glean is that one of them will be “sacred food” for the “Beast”, who is expected to turn up any time soon.

Shyamalan shows considerable technical mastery in the way he orchestrates the kidnapping as well as the subsequent chases and escapes attempts. The girls are locked up in an abandoned basement. There are echoes here of everything from last year’s Room to The Collector. His tricksy screenplay deliberately withholds lot of vital plot information from us so that we are as disoriented as the captives.

Every so often, Kevin, or one of his personalities, goes off to see the brilliant psychiatrist Dr Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who counsels him in her book-lined apartment. She knows his condition but doesn’t suspect quite what he is getting up to. There are also flashbacks to a little girl out on a hunting trip with her father and very creepy uncle. The significance of these scenes only becomes apparent very late on.

The film offers McAvoy not so much a plum of a role as a whole punnet full of plum roles. One moment, he’ll be the nice and very camp Hedwig, telling his captives about his collection of red and blue socks. The next, he’ll be the very neurotic and aggressive Dennis. We even get to see him in high heels as Patricia. The actor, often seen talking directly to camera, relishes a film which allows him to offer the same kind of demonic, hyper-charged performance he gave so memorably in Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth.

There are moments when it looks as if Split might stray off into Eli Roth torture porn style histrionics but Shyamalan tempers the blood letting. For much of its running time, the film is tense and genuinely intriguing.

Unfortunately, like a blackjack player who refuses to stick on a winning hand, the director keeps on twisting. As he does so, he adds more and more improbable elements into the storytelling which suddenly, for no very good reason, takes a supernatural turn reminiscent of an old Val Lewton horror movie. As the absurdities mount, the film loses its edge. For all the thrills along the way, Split doesn’t have any clear sense of its identity or of where it is headed or why.

Goodfellas (18)

★★★★★

Dir: Martin Scorsese, 145 mins, starring: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci

A welcome return for one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest films. It hasn’t aged in the slightest. What makes this such a special affair is its down to earth quality, its willingness to broach the everyday banality of gangster life. This isn’t a story about a Scarface-like uber-villain, going down in a hail of bullets. Its characters are career criminals who seem like any other group of middle-aged men with their very particular foibles.

Scorsese described the film as being like a “staged documentary”. The pleasures here come in the everyday details of what the gangsters get up to; where they eat dinner, how they treat their women (Saturday night is for wives, Fridays for girlfriends), and how they try to stand out from the rest of their community - all those “average nobody” dupes with the dreary nine to five jobs.

This is also surely Ray Liotta’s finest hour. As minor mobster Henry Hill, he has one of the great movie voice-overs. The film’s famous late multi-tasking scene in which a frazzled Harry tries forlornly to deal with Mafia business while keeping his private life on course, is an absolute tour de force.