The poster positions Philippe Falardeau’s follow-up to Monsieur Lazhar as the most turgid variety of soft-focus, Ron Howard-produced awards-bait – legally blonde Reese Witherspoon rescues Sudanese refugees! But in fact it reserves its closest attention for its migrants, charting with sincerity and authenticity the journey of these so-called “lost boys” from war-ravaged homeland to a Kansas City that, with its Happy Meals and waffle houses, makes a banally abundant kind of Oz. Margaret Nagle’s spirited script makes wry sport of the American Dream as a vaporous concept shaped by profit motives, political bias and outright BS: Witherspoon’s counsellor is an overworked cog in an imperfect system, no more heroic than anybody else here. The rougher edges of the likes of In This World or The Golden Dream were perhaps beyond its multiplex-oriented remit, but Falardeau works in surprising levels of funny, winning, stirring detail.
