THE GOOD LIE
This isn’t fully another Blind Side
The Good Lie
I’m not exactly sure that the lie that gives Reese Witherspoon top billing and a prominent place on the poster really qualifies as good, but anyway it is slightly heartening that it’s a lie. She’s the pretty blond recognizable face that you can sell the movie with, but The Good Lie is at least smart enough to relegate her to second-class status in the film itself. Which is another way to say that, despite what the advertisements tell you, then, this isn’t fully another Blind Side, where we learn that all any disadvantaged black person needs is a good, caring white lady to set them free.
We actually spend the first half-hour of the movie far away from Witherspoon and any other hints of America’s helping hand, following our group of Sudanese children as they escape their civil war across a sun-baked savanna. Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau, best known for Oscar nominee Monsieur Lazhar, takes us through these scenes with an economic brutality, starting with sharp, bright colours that seem to suggest even the earth they’re walking across is on fire. Falardeau stays restrained, subduing the horrors into something almost prosaic: Bodies float absently past the children as they cross a river, danger in their stillness; they bury one of their own with little ceremony and a toast of urine, “I do not want to die” in place of “Cheers.”
Undeniably bleak, there’s a matter-of-factness to its presentation that helps to ground things, especially once the children, now grown, are freed from the refugee camp and sent to America. Lead, however loosely, by Mamere (Arnold Oceng), the foursome — including Jeremiah (Ger Duany), Paul (Emmanuel Jai) and Abital (Kuoth Wiel) — are pretty quickly left to wander considerably more aimlessly in America, their new country’s coldness represented physically in the block of ice they pass around at the camp and spiritually by the way Abital is separated from the others immediately upon landing; being a woman, she has to be set up with a family, while the three barely men can apparently be left to their own devices.
Their sense of dislocation takes over the middle part of the movie, and it’s roughly where things start to break down a bit. It’s played chiefly for laughs, and while there are some knowing bits about the ridiculousness of American life — Mamere and Jeremiah, working as stock boys, rattle off different brands of Cheerios, trying to commit them to memory — there are times here when the movie threatens a kind of Coneheads broadness about how little these civil war refugees understand this modern world.
Here’s also where Witherspoon finally has something to do, though it’s rare her character doesn’t feel shoehorned in, the result of some executive’s notes about sell-ability. There are threads of an actual character here — she maybe used to be involved with her boss, her home and personal life is a mess, she don’t want to care about nobody but gosh darn it somebody has to help these people, etc. — but they’re most just briefly referenced and then passed over, our focus returning always to the Sudanese.
That’s a welcome overlook, but the sloppiness of Witherspoon’s character extends over to their story, which loses a lot of its blunt emotion in the second half of the film, given over to the boys trying to unite their family, sort of. In truth it mostly just feels like a great jumble of anecdotes given by various Sudanese refugees — the film’s issue-raising bona fides are firmly established with a website to visit at the end — given the most potentially heart-tugging story, on the assumption that sympathy will gloss over any holes.
The Good Lie does actually manage some moments in between, but it’s mostly a film of half-steps, neither fully committed to either its American saviours or its Sudanese subjects. It still deserves credit for fore fronting the latter’s story, but as with any issue, it’s never really just enough to acknowledge that you’re looking at it.