The Good Lie

The poster for The Good Lie features Reese Witherspoon’s pretty, smiling, lily-white visage prominently displayed well above an image of three faceless Africans walking across the plains. If this key art leads you to think the film will be yet another offensive example of a saccharine, insincere Hollywood tearjerker, that tells an important story about people of color through the shallow drama of a white person played by a big American movie star, fear not. This marketing campaign is its own form of “good lie,” tricking mainstream audiences into seeing a film about the plight of Sudanese refugees. Of course, The Good Lie is by no means an in-depth, complex examination of the crisis in North Africa, where war, famine, military regimes, and sectarian violence have had devastating effects for over sixty years.  But this movie does tell an honest and accessible immigration story that focuses on the difficulties of adapting to an alien culture while still staying true to one’s identity. 

Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal, and Kuoth Wiel star as orphans of the brutal Sudanese Civil war.  As children, they escape the massacre of their families and the destruction of their village. As adults, they are relocated to Kansas City by an American faith-based humanitarian program. Witherspoon is merely a supporting actor in this movie. She plays an employment councilor assigned to their case that befriends them and tries to help them find more than just work in their adoptive home.  This is the kind of theatrical feature we use to see a lot more of in the ‘80s, but that now is usually relegated to television.  Though it does not challenge its audience nor investigate the rich levels of its subject matter in a comprehensive way, it is an entertaining and touching, true-life tale. It eschews mawkish, easy sentimentality in favor of presenting an honest, if simple, portrait of its characters and their predicament. Much of the credit for the authenticity that shines through the Hollywood edifice comes from the four lead actors. All are actual Sudanese refugees, and two of them were former child soldiers. These actors are not playing themselves--this is a fictional film--but each seems to possess a genuine connection to the feelings of loss, pain, humiliation, bewilderment, humor, hope, strength, and dignity of the individuals they play. Witherspoon also comes across as credible, never overplaying the lovable brashness that is written into her character.

Director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar, In the Name of the Son) and screenwriter Margaret Nagle (a former TV star and TV movie writer) craft a clear, sincere, well-made film that, to its credit, does not adhere slavishly to issue-movie conventions. The film’s first act sets the tone and exemplifies the movie’s strengths and weaknesses. This beginning is too short, moving through perhaps the most interesting part of the story at a hurried pace. But it does its best to introduce us to the four main characters and give us an understanding of where they came from and what they faced during the thousand mile trek they made on foot from their destroyed village to a camp in Kenya. The filmmakers manage to squeeze a lot of drama, adventure, and exposition into this prologue--the pressure to get those sub-titles off the screen and get these kids to Kansas City where the fish-out-of-water comedy can start happening must have been tremendous for a movie aimed at a mainstream American audience. Commendably, the filmmakers start the movie by dropping us right into the Sudan where we meet the main characters as kids, rather than inventing some lame framing device with them as adults in America so Witherspoon’s character could appear in the first five minutes. Also, the relationship between the American stars, Witherspoon and Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris, This Is Where I Leave You, and Netflix’s House of Cards), never becomes a distracting romantic subplot that takes the film’s focus off the Sudanese characters and makes it seem like all their struggles and triumphs were in service of healing the wounded heart of the white protagonist.  Even more admirable is the understated way the film portrays Christianity. While it is clearly central to the lives of many characters and to the organization that brought these refugees to America, the movie never feels like product placement for organized religion.

Of course, for a film to be great, it has to do more than avoid being a terrible, formulaic, Hollywood cliché.  The Good Lie succeeds in avoiding nearly all the pitfalls it could have landed in. More importantly, it presents an honest, compassionate, and entertaining look at some of the real difficulties of contemporary immigration, by putting very likeable human faces on the issues.