"The Good Lie"

Director Philippe Falardeau’s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated "Monsieur Lazhar" focuses on Sudanese refugees seeking a new life in America, with Arnold Oceng and Reese Witherspoon

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 U.S. from the 1980s to the early 2000s, The Good Lie is a touching, generous-hearted movie, sensitively directed by Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) working with a smart, sly, long-gestated script by Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire).

But here’s the weird thing. At one point, the main protagonist, Mamere (British-based Arnold Oceng, who’s fantastic here), learns about “good lies,” untruths told to help others. Talk about irony: The current poster for 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’s 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 centers on a self-made family of refugees (all played by actors of Sudanese origin, some of whom were child soldiers themselves) who make it to the U.S. only to find the going there tough. Well-meaning Americans like Reese Witherspoon’s employment agency worker try to help smooth the transition. Scheduled to open in October, 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. Solid box-office results and awards-season heat should follow.

 

It’s worth mentioning this because what’s particularly laudable about the movie is the way it puts the African characters’ experiences front and center throughout in a way few mainstream American pictures do when engaging with African-set stories. The action starts in a small Sudanese village where brothers Mamere and Theo and their sister Abital (played as children by Peterdeng Mongok,Okwar Jale and Keji Jale, respectively) are suddenly and brutally displaced when soldiers come and kill most of the adults.

 

The village’s few other surviving children set out on an arduous, dangerous journey to Kenya, covering 735 miles 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 (played byThon Kueth and Deng Ajuet as children, and later by 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 United States. 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, padded up a bit to look rounder and sporting a greasy brunette mop), 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 American supermarkets. Sometimes the culture clash is played a little 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 Nagle and the other filmmakers’ research into Sudanese immigrant experiences.

In the third act, an engaged Carrie and others, including her boss (Corey Stoll) and various 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, delivered with dignity and understatement.

Director Falardeau also touched on the immigrant experience in his last feature, the Oscar-nominatedMonsieur Lazhar, but his experience early in his career as a cameraman shooting a documentary in Sudan is obviously even more germane to this material. The film is imbued with a rich sense of empathy for both the characters and the actors playing them, and the ensemble rewards him with fully committed turns. Witherspoon is on feisty form, but she doesn’t upstage her colleagues, allowing Oceng, Duany, Jal and, to a lesser extent, the luminous Kuoth Wiel (as the adult Abital), to rightly take center stage, in the film if not on the poster.

Production companies: An Alcon Entertainment, Imagine Entertainment, Black Label Media presentation of a Black Label Media, Imagine Entertainment, Reliance Entertainment Production
Cast: Arnold Oceng, Reese Witherspoon, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal, Corey Stoll, Kuoth Wiel, Femi Oguns, Sarah Baker, Peterdeng Mongok, Okwar Jale, Thon Kueth, Deng Ajuet, Keji Jale, Elikana Jale

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A good lie, according to Huckleberry Finn, is a prevarication where the “rightness” of the outcome excuses the “wrongness” of having fibbed in the first place. The good lie of “The Good Lie,” therefore, is that this true(ish) story of Sudanese refugees emigrating to America is a Reese Witherspoon movie, when in fact, she doesn’t show up until 35 minutes into an uplifting and overly earnest picture that isn’t really about her character at all — nor should it be. But if that mistruth helps spread the word about the Sudanese situation, earning Warner Bros. a pretty penny in the process, how wrong can it be?

The thing is, we miss Reese. Over the past decade, the actress has grown too scarce on the bigscreen, and though “Wild” promises to be her big awards vehicle this year, the advertising campaign for “The Good Lie” suggests a chance to see America’s sweetheart in feisty “Erin Brockovich” or “The Blind Side” mode, demanding, “Who do I have to screw around here to see a goddamn immigration supervisor?” in her most sexually empowered redneck drawl.

That happens, by the way, but it’s hardly typical of director Philippe Falardeau’s sensitive yet play-it-safe approach. Surely it’s for the best that such white-girl-to-the-rescue theatrics account for just one scene in a movie that otherwise has the good sense to focus on four Sudanese refugees offered shelter in America. Part of a resettlement effort of nearly 3,600, dubbed the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” these four arrive in the U.S. 13 years after militia attacks left them orphaned and homeless, and one year before 9/11 forced authorities to suspend the program out of anti-terrorist concerns.

Though the characters themselves are fictional, screenwriter Margaret Nagle (“Boardwalk Empire”) based them on the experiences of real Sudanese refugees, opening the film with a group of six children, brought together by violence, who walk hundreds of miles in search of safety. Coming off his more confrontational 2012 foreign-language Oscar nominee “Monsieur Lazhar,” Canadian director Falardeau presents the Sudanese trauma with kid gloves, as if trying to protect young Western audiences from getting too vivid an idea of what they went through.

Filming for his first time in English (as well as the Nuer and Dinka dialects) and using Sudanese actors with actual ties to the events, the helmer rejects the gritty pseudo-docu staging of pics like “Hotel Rwanda” or the hallucinatory brutality of this year’s “White Shadow.” Falardeau actually spent time filming in Sudan for a completely different project back in 1994 before being forced to evacuate by the U.N., but he consciously decides not to rub our noses in tarted-up awfulness, opting for steady-footed lensing and subdued music, then trusting our imaginations to fill in the horrors.

This also conveniently allows the pic to bring back characters we pessimistically might have assumed to be dead. The family-like group of six loses two members before reaching the refugee camp, and is forced to split up further after passing through customs in New York. The three men — Jeremiah (Ger Duany), Paul (Emmanuel Jal) and default “chief” Mamere (Arnold Oceng) — are given an apartment to share in Kansas City, Mo., while their sister, Abital (Kuoth Wiel), is sent off to Boston. When the refugees’ sponsor drops the ball, it falls to Witherspoon’s character, an employment counselor named Carrie, to meet them at the airport.

Faced with culture shock, all these men struggle with different issues, from drug abuse to incompatible values (Jeremiah rather poignantly resigns from his supermarket stocker job because he can’t bear to let good produce go to waste). But Mamere’s dreams take precedence — first, to study medicine and become a doctor, and second, to reunite the group’s splintered family, whatever the cost. Along the way, the pic can’t resist a few easy-chuckle “Coming to America”-style fish-out-of-water gags: The three men are startled when the apartment phone rings, for instance, and Mamere doesn’t realize he’s offending when he gives Carrie the nickname “Yaardit,” which roughly translates to “great white cow.”

Mamere means this as a term of respect, and the movie takes great care to show how appreciative the refugees are to be given such an opportunity, even though the adjustment can be difficult. It also reveals how thick-skinned Americans like Carrie and her boss Jack (Corey Stoll) have been compelled to rearrange their priorities after interacting with those in such dire need of support — the angle that no doubt justifies Witherspoon’s poster-girl status. And let’s admit it: She’s the reason most people will see the movie anyway. Otherwise, they’d do better to seek out docus “God Grew Tired of Us” or “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” or track down Warren St. John’s stirring memoir, “Outcasts United,” about coaching an all-refugee youth soccer team in Clarkston, Ga.