The Good Lie

So I saw The Good Lie and I was pleasantly surprised by what it wasn’t. The movie is about a group of kids from Sudan, who make the thousand mile walk from their home to a refugee center, and eventually arrive in America, where they face new and unusual challenges. I was worried that the movie would be based around either The Gods Must Be Crazy style culture-clashes or that it would turn into some kind of Blind Side knock-off based around the three brothers’ (Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal) relationship with Carrie (Reese Witherspoon) who works for an employment agency finding them jobs.

Instead I was surprised to find that the movie mostly focused on the lives of the three men and their sister and their trek from Sudan to Ethiopia, and how they worked to actually build lives for themselves once they arrived in the United States. The African scenes were really affecting for me, they gave a sense of the both the beauty of the African landscape and the danger that seems to lurk around every corner. The kids starve and get dehydrated, they have to avoid both wild animals and soldiers that will either kill them or force them to fight on their side. In America they have to find work despite not having much education and being faced with a culture and environment that is totally alien. I think the movie did a pretty good job making the audience step back a bit and look at ourselves with an outsiders eye.

In all this is a decent movie, and could be an entrance to learning about the Lost Boys of Sudan in a way that’s based a bit more around hope and less around misery. It’s not a great movie, but I think it does what it sets out to do.