Beyond the Multiplex

"God Grew Tired of Us": From the refugee camp to the supermarket
"Does Santa appear in the Bible?" wonders a recent Sudanese refugee, confronting the bewildering spectacle of Christmas shopping at a mall in Syracuse, N.Y. He knows what Christmas is; it was celebrated with rituals and dancing every December in the Kenyan relief camp where he has lived for the previous 10 years. But what is the connection, he wonders, between this fat man in a red suit and the birth of Jesus Christ?

For American viewers, moments like those may be the most pungent in Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker's documentary "God Grew Tired of Us," which follows a small group of Sudan's "lost boys" into their new American lives. The young men in the film have never operated an electrical appliance or a water faucet, never been inside a building of more than one story. On their first plane voyage, they clownishly stumble on and off escalators, eat the margarine and salad dressing out of their little plastic pouches, wander through the vast corridors of airports in Nairobi, Brussels and New York in single-file amazement.

But the comedy of their journey from one world to another is not cruel. Instead it is wrenching, pathetic and noble, and along the way the three men at the heart of "God Grew Tired of Us" come to stand for more than themselves. Like all of humanity, they have come out of a pre-industrial age and into a postmodern one rapidly. For most of us in the West, the process began with the birth of our grandparents or even great-grandparents. The lost boys made the journey in two days instead of 100 years or more, but their dislocation in the world of swimming pools, supermarkets and Santa Claus is nonetheless familiar to us.

Why is it, as one of them wonders aloud, that using Palmolive dishwashing liquid does not turn everything in your kitchen green? Why is it green at all? During a tour of an enormous Pennsylvania grocery store, they commit the phrase "hoagie rolls" to memory as an important element of American culture. One man peers dubiously at a mountainous pile of waxy, green cucumbers and inquires, "Is this edible?" Another comes to understand that Americans prefer potatoes that have been cooked, sliced into fine slivers, heavily salted and stored in a colorful plastic bag.

So much history and geography is covered in "God Grew Tired of Us," and the human story it conveys is so moving and so charged with ambiguous moral lessons, that it seems almost irresponsible to complain about it on formal or historical grounds. Let's put it this way: This is an important film. It's amazing that it exists, and the events it recounts are still more amazing. Everybody should see it.

That said, the film has a certain TV-documentary feel that I found intermittently irritating. Re-creations of real events are not clearly identified as such, and historical file footage of the disaster in Sudan is not labeled with dates or place names or anything else. (Did they just appropriate random footage of starving African children? We can't be sure.) Quinn and Walker provide almost no context for the mid-1980s civil war that devastated that country and led to the near-biblical exodus of boys and young men from the agricultural regions of southern Sudan, and Nicole Kidman's voice-over narration sounds as if it were phoned in from the manicurist's chair.

There is a defense for all this, and maybe it's an adequate one. Quinn and Walker's film is only indirectly or accidentally about the horrendous Sudanese war, or about the many thousands of people who were killed, wounded or permanently uprooted by it. It's about a relatively small number of the lost boys (perhaps 3,600 or so of the 27,000 Sudanese boys driven from their homes by Muslim militias during the mid- and late '80s) who were allowed to come to the United States after several years of wandering and another decade in a Kenyan refugee camp.

Even more specifically, it's about three of those young men -- John Bul Dau, Panther Bior and Daniel Pach -- who have not only survived their ordeal but also, more or less, prospered in their new surroundings. In many ways, "God Grew Tired of Us" is a classic paradoxical fable of immigration, whose protagonists exchange a warm realm of community (and dire poverty) for a colder one of round-the-clock labor and social isolation (along with astonishing material wealth), and then try to rebuild something of what they have lost.

Dau, an inordinately tall and elegant man with philosophical inclinations, was a leader in the Kakuma, Kenya, relief camp -- he was 13 when he got there, which made him one of the older boys to make the terrible journey -- and has since become the de facto leader of the Sudanese community in the United States. He worked tirelessly to put himself through school, flipping burgers at McDonald's and packing gaskets in a factory. He has published a memoir, founded a foundation for Sudan relief and now directs a fundraising program aimed at building a medical clinic in his home region.

His inspirational saga concludes with an airport reunion with his mother, whom he hasn't seen for 17 years. Neither of them has known whether the other was alive or dead, and I defy anyone to watch this scene without weeping. I have mixed feelings about the filmmakers' decision to focus exclusively on the success stories among the lost boys (as many as 16,000 boys who began the trek out of Sudan did not survive it, and most who did survive did not find refuge in the West), but the extraordinary pent-up emotion that pours out during this scene expresses much of the terror and tragedy that "God Grew Tired of Us" otherwise keeps at bay.

Bior and Pach don't have quite such amazing stories, but both hold solid American jobs, have made contact with surviving family members and are working to help their homeland. Depicting these survivors as complicated human beings who act as agents in their own lives, rather than saints, victims or statistics, is beyond question an honorable goal. All three of these men are likable, generous, conflicted characters, profoundly grateful for their opportunities but wistful about what they have left behind.

But "God Grew Tired of Us" may convey the impression -- unintentionally, I think -- that a few years of service-sector drudgery and a community-college degree is sufficient to lift the wretched of the earth to the lower fringes of middle-class life. I wanted to slap the woman at a swimming pool who smugly asks Pach whether he enjoys more "freedoms" than he did before, as if that debased concept could mean anything to a man with his life experience.

What has really happened to John Bul Dau and his friends is more in the nature of a miraculous accident than a self-help fable, and one miracle, or three, or 100, is not sufficient to redeem the awful history that produced them. That's a fact this movie can't quite face, but perhaps it shouldn't have to. There are certainly lessons to be learned from this incredible story, but for the moment they remain mysterious. Almost as mysterious, perhaps, as the connection between Santa and Jesus, or the unsolved riddle of Palmolive green.

"God Grew Tired of Us" opens Jan. 12 in New York and Los Angeles; Jan. 19 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington; Jan. 26 in Nashville; Feb. 2 in Dallas, St. Louis, Seattle, Tucson, Ariz., and Austin, Texas; and Feb. 9 in Pittsburgh, with more cities to follow.

Next page: What ever happened to Megumi Yokota?