I have to admit, this one took me by surprise. I did not even remotely expect a film with so little buzz, so thoroughly drowned out by all the last-minute Oscar contenders, to rack up so many nominations including Best Picture. I had to see this movie, if only to see how I could have guessed so spectacularly wrong.

And the very first thing I saw was the logo for the Weinstein Company. Question answered.

Lion dramatizes the real-life story of Saroo Brierley, here immortalized as an adult by Dev Patel and as a five-year-old by newcomer Sunny Pawar. Saroo grew up dirt-poor in India, working with his older brother (Guddu, played by Abhishek Bharate) to sell coal that they lifted from passing trains. To make a long story short, the two brothers are separated when Saroo falls asleep on a decommissioned train that should never have had any passengers on it.

The train keeps on going until Calcutta, which is so far away that nobody there even speaks the same language as Saroo. Saroo has no family, no friends, no means of contacting his mother, he came from a podunk town that nobody’s heard of, and he doesn’t even know his mother’s name. To make an even longer story short (seriously, this is the entire first half of the movie), Saroo bounces around from place to place until he’s adopted by a nice Australian family. So off he goes to live with John and Sue Brierley, respectively played by David Wenham and Nicole Kidman.

Cut to twenty years later. After going off to college and meeting so many people from different backgrounds, Saroo is forcibly reminded of his uncertain past. Moreover, he’s reminded of the family he left behind, who’s been most assuredly worrying about him for the past twenty freaking years. Much as he loves his adoptive family, there’s closure that Saroo very desperately needs. He has to go back home, even if all the years of change would make him a stranger in his own native land.

Given the nature of the material and the involvement of Dev Patel, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was Slumdog Millionaire redux. But there’s a crucial difference: Eight years. Patel is that much older, with that much more experience, and it really shows. His work in this film is simply amazing. Likewise, Kidman and Wenham are both phenomenal — Kidman in particular brings the house down like only she can. Sunny Pawar is a hell of a find as well.

Alas, the film has a very prominent weak link: Rooney Mara, in the role of Saroo’s girlfriend. Unfortunately, this romance arc goes from zero to “true love” in about thirty seconds. The relationship is so underdeveloped and the chemistry is so inert that despite the best efforts of the actors involved, it simply doesn’t work. And because the romance is pretty much the only reason why Mara’s character is there, the whole thing falls flat.

(Side note: The whole time Mara was onscreen, I kept wondering “Where is Mia Wasikowska when you need her?!” With all respect, she’s a far better actor and she’s actually Australian!)

But let’s get back to Patel. You may have noticed that he’s only up for Best Supporting Actor, even though he’s playing the main character and it’s his name on the top of the marquee. Why is that? Well, as I said before, he doesn’t even show up until AN HOUR IN.

Saroo first goes missing at the ten-minute mark, and the twenty-year jump doesn’t happen until an hour in. Through all that time in between, it’s just Saroo going on various misadventures that have fuck-all to do with the story we came here to see. There’s nothing that provides any kind of clue to help Saroo find his way back later on, so it’s all rendered moot the second he goes to Australia. Moreover, we know full well that Saroo isn’t going back home in this first hour because we know he’s going to grow into Dev Patel and we’re waiting for him to just get on with it already!

To be clear, there’s a lot of good stuff in there about the hundreds and thousands of Indian children who go missing every year, but I’d think that the basic premise would be enough to get the point across without quite so much elaboration. And of course there’s a lot of crucial prologue that needs to be established, so it’s not like that first hour could have been cut entirely. Even so, all that’s really important is the stuff that happened before Saroo went missing and what happened after he got adopted. Everything in between is interesting and all, but it could have and should have been cut to develop the stuff that actually mattered. If nothing else, Patel should have come in at the end of the first act and not the end of the first fucking half.

Still, when Lion works, it works beautifully. It’s a deeply heartfelt telling of an extraordinary story, and the cast is uniformly exceptional in portraying the people involved. Rooney Mara is admittedly the weak link, but even she might have been something special if the lopsided structure hadn’t given her so little to work with. Which brings me to the film’s major problem.

Each individual scene is compelling and poignant, but that doesn’t change the fact that half the film could have been cut with no ill effect. The filmmakers were evidently so focused on the minor details that the bigger picture went awry. It’s definitely not a bad picture overall, but I find it hard to recommend to anyone but Oscar completionists when there are so many other fine movies still out there. That aside, this is certainly worth a rental at the very least.