Saroo Brierley’s story is exhibit A for you can’t make this stuff up: As a 5-year-old born in a small village in India, Saroo was accidentally separated from his family and, eventually, brought to an orphanage in Calcutta, from which he was adopted by an Australian couple. As an adult, he found them again, partly with the help of Google Earth.
It sounds like the machinations of a product-placement genius, but it actually happened. Brierley wrote about his life story in his memoir, A Long Way Home, and now it’s been turned into Lion.
The Hollywood temptation in adapting material like Brierley’s life for the screen is to make a fairly standard inspirational movie about the power of the human spirit. Lion has all those things, but director Garth Davis, working with a screenplay by Luke Davies, pulls off something much better. Lion is moving, beautifully shot, and clear-eyed about its aims. It’s the kind of inspirational movie even a film snob could love.