Coming soon! From the executive producers and White Saviour smugness of The Blind Side! Starring Reese Witherspoon! Oh, and, you know, some black actors, two of whom were actually child soldiers during the Sudanese civil war. But that’s no fun, so let’s have some more fish-outta-water jokes and Witherspoon one-liners!
A disappointingly whitewashed account of Sudanese refugees moving to America, The Good Lie finds director Phillippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) playing it safe when it comes to genuine horror – and playing it up when it comes to predictable Hollywood tropes. A fictional account of just four of the 3,600 “Lost Boys of Sudan” who were resettled in the States following the Sudanese civil war, The Good Lie sees Jeremiah (Ger Duany), Paul (Emmanuel Jal), Mamere (Arnold Oceng) and their sister Abital (Kuoth Wiel) arrive in the States 13 years after militia attacks destroyed their home. It’s also one year before 9/11, when the resettlement programme was suspended in anti-terrorist panic.
Though Falardeau dedicates a good amount of time to both the boys’ daunting trek across Africa in search of a refugee camp, as well as their adjustment to America, he fails to show real PTSD, instead settling for implications of atrocity and cute misunderstandings about phones and McDonalds. Witherspoon admittedly gets less screen time than the leads, but she does at least get a developed back story and personality, while the other characters are fetishised as earnest and religious child-men. Steadicams and gently heart-tugging music echo the frustratingly bland narrative. Frankly, a major dud.