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'The Beautiful Country': New dreams for old lives

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Among the lingering casualties of the Vietnam war were the offspring of American G.I.s and Vietnamese women. "The Beautiful Country," a powerful and perceptive film set in 1990, concerns Binh (Damien Nguyen), a young man who lives with his adoptive parents in rural Vietnam.

A head taller than everyone else, Binh is despised as a half-breed — a "bui doi," which roughly translates as "less than dust." Children routinely order him around and he's not even allowed to eat inside with the rest of the family.

Sony Pictures Classics

'The Beautiful Country'

The verdict: A beautiful, albeit slow, movie about the promises America makes, but doesn't always keep.

Director: Hans PetTer Moland
Starring: Damien Nguyen, Bai Ling, Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Anh Thu
Run time: 126 minutes
Release date: July 8, 2005
Rating: R for some language and a crude sexual reference.

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Holding a worn-out photo of his parents and a tattered marriage certificate that says his father is from Houston, Binh goes to Saigon to find his mother, who now works as a domestic for a wealthy, arrogant family. Shortly thereafter, he sets out for the beautiful country, America, that fabled place of spacious skies and amber waves of grain.

To get there, he endures Dickensian miseries that take him from an overcrowded refugee camp in Malaysia to a hell ship captained by a casually cruel, chillingly pragmatic Tim Roth. Finally, he arrives in Manhattan where he works as a slave laborer in Chinatown.

On his way to the United States, he hooks up with Ling (Bai Ling), a beautiful, sad-eyed Chinese prostitute who barters her body to help pay their way. When she does essentially the same thing in Manhattan — she finds a smitten customer who turns out to be a decent guy — Binh freaks out and leaves for Texas. There, on a lonely Texas prairie, cutting a blind man's hair in the middle of nowhere, Binh finds the beautiful country he so diligently sought.

Terrence Malick is one of the producers, so it's no wonder the film is filled with randomly gorgeous images — a rickety bicycle bridge in Vietnam, a perfect Texas sunset. Malick also discovered the story and one can't help but wish he'd directed as well. Not that Norwegian Hans Petter Moland does a bad job, but a certain epic sweep is missing. The pacing is slow — well, Malick wouldn't have helped there — but the movie could've had a harder edge.

Still, Moland doesn't skimp on the horrors Binh endures. The voyage on Roth's rusted-out tanker is a nightmare of starvation, mistreatment and death. Life as an illegal in Chinatown isn't much better. Thus any moments of kindness and beauty become all the more important. Like when a tough Vietnam vet who lost an arm over there offers Binh a ride instead of a beating.

Along with 1983's "El Norte" and 1963's "America, America," "The Beautiful Country" conveys something essential about the immigrant experience. About the reinvention of one's self as well as one's dreams. On the tanker, Roth notices Binh's potential and tries to steer him to another country instead of the U.S. But Binh declines. "I offer you a new life," Roth says with a sigh. "And you choose an old dream."

That's the trade-off, the movie says. New lives for old dreams. New dreams for old lives.