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True "Lie"

Where even excellent films like last year's "Dallas Buyer's Club" and 2008's "Milk" flirt with sentimentality or hero worship, "The Good Lie" stays on a path that tracks the lives of ordinary people surviving extraordinary circumstances against the contours of a crisis that is still tearing apart the Sudanese region.

"The Good Lie" opens 15 years before the main narrative of the film, in a village in South Sudan. There we meet Theo (Okwar Jale) and Mamere (Peterdeng Mongok), the sons of the tribal leader. When war comes to the village, Theo leads a small band of children out of the area. Along the way, they befriend two brothers, Jeremiah (Thon Kueth) and Paul (Deng Ajust). Eventually, the refugees reach the banks of a river. A la Moses, Theo leads his growing tribe across it, as soldiers gun down refugees, whose bodies float across the wading childrens' path. Theo is taken by militia, leaving young Mamere as the new leader of the tribe.

The film jumps to the early 2000s. The four have been living in a Kenyan refugee camp for over 13 years. Mamere (Arnold Oceng) is a promising medical apprentice approved to migrate to the United States. The rest of the film deals with Mamere and his family adjusting to life in America, with the scars of losing Theo (Femi Oguns), and with trying to reunite with their sister Abital (Kuoth Wiel), whom the INS sent to Boston while Mamere, Jeremiah (Ger Duany) and Paul (Emmanual Jal) were relocated to Kansas City.

In Kansas City, their sponsor can't make it to the airport so she calls her friend, Carrie (Reese Witherspoon, "Walk the Line"). Carrie is reluctant, but picks them up. After she has no luck placing them on their first interview she takes them to her boss, Jack (Corey Stoll). At first, Carrie and Jack resist getting involved in the lives of the three men, but they are slowly pulled in.

Just as the characters provide strong support for the three amazing men, Witherspoon and Stoll provide strong supporting roles to the compelling leads. Stoll is just about perfect in his small role. Witherspoon might not deserve an Oscar, but she brings a naturalness to the role that is often upended when big-name actresses play serious, small-town roles. The film, thankfully, keeps these roles secondary. There is more setup on Carrie's character than resolution, which is refreshing. For example, when she stops by Jack's with the three refugees, they have a moment alone where they talk about the state of Jack's house, suggesting a closer, probably romantic, relationship between them. But the film does not revolve around their relationship or bringing them back together.

Overall, the film has a complicated story to tell filled with history, literary tropes, and a message about refugee crises. Hollywood loves the bio-flick and the based-on-a-true-story, power-of-the-human-spirit vehicle, with an American sweetheart on her own journey of self-realization, spiced up with tableaus of Africa. On paper, this should be a recipe for disaster. Credits to writer Margaret Nagle (TV's "Boardwalk Empire" and "Red Band Society"; "Warm Springs"), director Philippe Falardeau ("Monsieur Lazhar", "Congorama"), and an excellent cast of African actors (most of whom were refugees or children of refugees from the Sudanese civil war) for delivering its opposite.