The Good Lie review: Reese Witherspoon drama cannot fail to move you

Director: Philippe Falardeau; Screenwriter: Margaret Nagle; Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Corey Stoll, Sarah Baker, Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal; Running time: 110 mins; Certificate: 12A

You cannot fail to be moved by this story of young Sudanese refugees - and not just to tears either. Director Philippe Falardeau (working in similar territory to his Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar) deftly treads the boundaries between tragedy and comedy to depict major upheaval for three brothers who eventually look to Reese Witherspoon's brassy employment agent to settle them into the American way of life.

The changing tone is marked by bends in a very long road, first leading from a small Sudanese village to a refugee camp in Kenya. Mamere (Brixton-based actor Arnold Oceng), Jeremiah (Ger Duany) and Paul (Emmanuel Jal), along with their sister Abital (Kuoth Wiel) and the eldest, Theo (Femi Ogun), survive a massacre by soldiers in the country's second civil war before trekking 735 miles through desert brushland. When Theo is snatched, it is a defining moment for Mamere, who must take the lead.

Over a decade goes by before the youngsters - now young adults - are relocated to the US as part of a UN-backed initiative (one that took thousands of so-called 'Lost Boys' from Sudan to the States in 2000). Falardeau follows Mamere, Jeremiah and Paul to Kansas City while Abital is sent off to Boston (due to the vagaries of the system) and from this point, Falardeau seems to shift down a gear. He trades on the boys' bemused reactions to electricity, ringing telephones and McDonald's milkshakes for what now feels like a fish-out-of-water comedy, except that rather than encouraging you to laugh at the boys' plight, Falardeau is sympathetic to their point-of-view, underlining the conveniences the rest of us take for granted.

As Carrie, Witherspoon often cracks a wry smile at their antics, but she's also harried and rather shambolic and in some ways a bit of a cliché. She doesn't intend on getting "too involved" in the boys' lives while striving to get them work, but the opposite inevitably happens. Still, it's a credit to both Falardeau and Witherspoon that she doesn't overwhelm the story with her own issues, which might have been too sentimentality rendered and unseemly for that. Instead, Oceng is a strong anchor as Mamere, who takes his position as the surviving tribal chief quite seriously, while Duany and Jal (both 'Lost Boys' in real life, who were also forced to serve as child soldiers) struggle with being invisible in society.

The theory of 'a good lie' comes into play at vital junctures, when the strongest in the group must protect the more vulnerable members, but the strength of this film is that it doesn't make victims out of people who would otherwise be classed as such and because of this, it is truly uplifting.

Jal's storyline takes another dramatic turn after he gets a taste for Class B drugs. Again, Falardeau shows a light touch (after one of the funnier 'stoner' scenes of recent years) and creates poignant moments out of the ensuing brotherly discord, rather than easy melodrama. The theory of 'a good lie' comes into play at vital junctures, when the strongest in the group must protect the more vulnerable members, but the strength of this film is that it doesn't make victims out of people who would otherwise be classed as such and because of this, it is truly uplifting.