Coming to America: Jack (Corey Stoll) and Mamere (Arnold Oceng). Coming to America: Jack (Corey Stoll) and Mamere (Arnold Oceng).
THE GOOD LIE
DIRECTOR: Philippe Falardeau
CAST: Reese Witherspoon, Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal, Corey Stoll and Kuoth Wiel
CLASSIFICATION: 13 VD
RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes
RATING: ***
Inspired by the experience of the thousands of so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan,” the Sudanese refugees of both genders who were allowed to emigrate to the US from the 1980s to the early 2000s, The Good Lie is a touching, generous-hearted movie, sensitively directed by Philippe Falardeau working with a smart, sly, long-gestated script by Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire).
It centres on a self-made family of refugees (all played by actors of Sudanese origin, some of whom were child soldiers) who make it to the US only to find the going there tough. Well-meaning Americans like Reese Witherspoon’s employment agency worker try to help smooth the transition.
Its white-people-help-black-people subplot is bound to attract comparisons with The Blind Side, even though The Good Lie is a more nuanced, less aggressively punch-the-air feel-good film.
But here’s the weird thing. At one point, the main protagonist, Mamere (Arnold Oceng), learns about “good lies,” untruths told to help others. Talk about irony: the poster for this film is one big, maybe not-so-good lie, featuring a large image of Witherspoon’s head hovering over three small, indistinct African figures walking across the savannah. Like a recent, widely decried Italian-made poster for 12 Years a Slave, it strongly misrepresents who is the focus of the film. It could, and no doubt will be argued that Witherspoon’s image will help draw viewers to see a movie about a sometimes upsetting subject. But the marketing does a serious disservice to the film.
It’s worth mentioning this because what’s particularly laudable about the movie is the way it puts the African characters’ experiences front and centre throughout in a way few mainstream US pictures do when engaging with African-set stories.
The action starts in a Sudanese village where brothers Mamere and Theo and their sister Abital (Peterdeng Mongok, Okwar Jale and Keji Jale, respectively) are suddenly and brutally displaced when soldiers kill most of the adults.
The village’s few other surviving children set out on an arduous, dangerous journey to Kenya on foot, losing friends and siblings to starvation, dehydration, and murderous soldiers. Along the way, they befriend two brothers from another part of Sudan, Jeremiah and Paul (Thon Kueth and Deng Ajuet as children, Ger Duany and Emmanuel Jal as adults). Theo makes a sacrifice to save the others that sees him forcibly conscripted by a rebel platoon, an act of heroism that will haunt Mamere for the rest of his life.
The five children spend 13 years at the Kakuma refugee camp before they learn that they’ve been offered a chance to emigrate to the US. But on arrival, the sponsoring agency insists that Abital must go to live in Boston while Mamere, Jeremiah and Paul are sent to Kansas City.
In Missouri, the men are met at the airport by Carrie (Witherspoon), a brusque employment-agency fixer tasked with finding the men employment. She succeeds, but the guys suffer an almighty case of culture shock as they encounter all manner of First World gadgets and novelties they’ve never seen before, like light switches and the seemingly infinite variety of breakfast cereals stocked in US supermarkets. Sometimes the culture clash is played too broadly for laughs, like when the Africans don’t understand what a phone is, but presumably some of this must have been based on anecdotes garnered from research into Sudanese immigrant experiences.
In the third act, an engaged Carrie and others, including her boss (Corey Stoll) and sympathetic bureaucrats pull together to help get Abital moved to Missouri and assist Mamere with tracking down a long-lost loved one, leading to a deeply satisfying climax.
The film is imbued with a rich sense of empathy for the charac-ters and the actors playing them. Witherspoon is on feisty form, but she allows Oceng, Duany, Jal and, Kuoth Wiel (as the adult Abital), to take centre stage. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Million Dollar Arm or God Grew Tired of Us, you’ll like this.