Review: ‘The Good Lie’

This based-on-actual-events film tells the story of Sudan’s ‘lost boys’, a group of survivors from Sudan’s bloody civil war who managed to escape to America and build new lives.

The film opens in a Sudanese village where children play games while adults prepare meals, hunt and gather food. The sound of a helicopter overhead presages doom, and within minutes the entire village is slaughtered – apart from three children who hide in a tree while the soldiers lay waste to their home.

Mamere, Theo and Abital leave their ruined village and walk hundreds of miles across treacherous, war-torn terrain –  joining other children making a similar pilgrimage. Where they are going, they’re unsure. They just know there must be a safe place for them somewhere.

They find that place at a Kenyan refugee camp, where they remain for thirteen years. Then they find themselves picked for a programme that will send them to the USA to find work.

Their arrival in America is not smooth. As soon as they land, red tape separates Abital from her brothers and the two boys she has come to call family. She is sent to Boston while the boys end up in Kansas City.

It’s there the boys meet Carrie, a counselor tasked with finding them work and settling them into their new country. Not an easy job when these boys have never even seen a telephone – some of the film’s funniest and most touching scenes are the ones where the boys first come into contact with modern technology.

Carrie’s own life is a mess. But somehow, through helping these strangers in her land, she manages to find a purpose and joy in life she would never have thought possible.

Witherspoon plays Carrie completely without glamour. She’s a tough, no nonsense gal, self-centered and uninterested in the world outside her own narrow experiences. But through her journey with the Sudanese family, she grows and changes in ways you can see as well as feel. The actors playing the Sudanese characters are all real survivors and their performances are so authentic and heartbreakingly real, it’s worth the price of admission alone.

This is not a great film – it shies away from the real horrors the refugees face and makes their new lives in America seem more idyllic than they could possibly have been – but it does a good job of highlighting events and people that many of us probably know little about. You could certainly find worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

5/10

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