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PLOT: In 1990, Binh, one of Vietnam's many discriminated-against bui doi (children fathered by U.S. servicemen), seeks his family in an arduous journey that takes him to Texas via the refugee "snakehead" trade.
If the road to hell really is paved with good intentions, cliches and stock characters are the asphalt.
So it is with The Beautiful Country, a movie fueled by secondhand outrage over the plight of Vietnamese bui doi, children fathered by American servicemen who shot and ran during the Vietnamese War.
Produced by Terence Malick and shot by Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, it is exactly the sort of languid, landscape-loving travelogue you might expect from the former, minus the emotional fireworks and action.
Binh (Damien Nguyen) is tall and awkward, with a distinctly different physiognomy from his aunts, uncles and cousins, who barely tolerate his hard-working presence and call him "pig face." But our Vietnamese Cinderella dreams of finding his long-lost mother, and farther down the road, finding his American dad (both of whom exist only in the form of a tattered old photo -- and whaddya know? His dad is Nick Nolte).
Spurred to act by his aunt's decision to marry a cruel old man, he travels to Ho Chi Minh City (circa 1990) to find his real mother working in a rich woman's house. He also finds he has a young half-brother living with her.
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His appearance is not welcome on several fronts. And without playing spoiler, suffice to say that Binh and little brother Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh) are soon running from police, and aboard a junk to Malaysia, there to land in a refugee camp.
The whole movie is a series of such unfortunate events that move the plot to the next square, with characters of minor interest introduced (and as quickly discarded). In the refugee camp, we meet Ling (Bai Ling), the proverbial hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, who will follow our boys to America, and cynical sounding board Chingmy (Chapman To) who won't.
Next stop, a "Snakehead" freighter captained by a cynical British sea captain (Tim Roth), that will serve as Binh, Tam and Ling's squalid home for the long passage to America. It happens that these are the only scenes where director Moland stops to catch his breath and the movie itself starts to breathe. The people in the hold have their own rough justice and social life, centred around weird, viciously-competitive gambling games where the winner is the one who knows the most American words and phrases ( "NBA... Q-Tip... Route 66"). People die, and the gravity of the story begins to coalesce.
And then it passes. Roth's good-guy captain moves on as the human cargo is swallowed by the New York Chinese underworld. And The Beautiful Country again becomes a series of events that lead to a date with a possibly-tranquilized Nick Nolte in Texas.
Through it all, Binh's Buddhist stoicism plays as impassivity -- as if the whole thing wasn't emotionally empty enough.
Finally, what does the tale of one improbable journey and (as the plot would have it) an ultimately blameless dad have to do with the real-life mass betrayal of women and children by American men and their government?
(This film is rated PG)