Children's Crusade
War-child searches for family, self, in gripping 'Beautiful Country'

America's misadventures abroad have far-reaching consequences that most of us never even imagine. Alongside the death toll of U.S. military interventions overseas rises what you might call the life toll: mixed-race children fathered by American servicemen in foreign nations, children who grow up between two worlds in which they never quite belong.

Norwegian filmmaker Hans Petter Moland's heartfelt The Beautiful Country is in no way a political diatribe about this issue. Instead, it's a gripping human story about one young man's journey toward his own cultural identity that stretches from the rural provinces of Vietnam to Houston, Texas. With an international crew (the film was scripted by Filipina-American Sabina Murray, who grew up in Australia), Moland tells an insightful, often harrowing tale as rife with cruelty, complexity, generosity and deep emotion as humanity itself.

In Vietnam, the term "Bui Doi"—"less than dust"—is an insult lobbed at the Amer-Asian children of long-gone American GIs and Vietnamese women. The story begins in 1990, with one such outcast, Binh (Damien Nguyen), a young man raised by a foster family in a small rural village. Binh lives a Cinderella-like existence: taller than his neighbors and regularly denounced as "ugly," he does all the family's menial labor, but gets left behind when the others go out for festivals and fun.

Ousted from the family by an incoming suitor, Binh learns that his birth mother is still alive in Saigon, and goes to the city to find her. Mai (Chau Thi Kim Xuan), a mistreated servant in a wealthy household, weeps with joy at the reunion with her lost son, and brings him home to the tenement she shares with Tam, Binh's little half-brother by a different father. Mai tells Binh the American father she loved simply disappeared out of their lives one day, and gets Binh a job as houseboy. But circumstances intervene, and Binh must flee for his life, with Tam, and Mai's marriage certificate, hoping to find his father in the U.S.A.

The brothers join a boatload of evacuees who endure raging storms and deadly calms in the South China Sea. When they finally make landfall on a pristine beach, they're carted off to a prison-like Malaysian refugee camp. There, they are befriended by succulent inmate Ling (Bai Ling), a Chinese prostitute who says she's "dead inside," yet supplies the money with which all three escape to an Australian freighter offshore heading for America. But the freighter is no better than a slave ship, smuggling in illegal aliens forced to sign up for a life of indentured servitude as the price of their voyage—while battling venal guards, near-starvation, and disease. Ultimately, the action moves to the teeming streets of New York City and the wide open spaces of rural Texas, as Binh heads for the emotional showdown he most craves and dreads.

The plot unspools with the unpredictability of human nature. As Binh encounters expatriate Asians, rapacious Australians, or a truckload of redneck Vietnam vets, we never know from one minute to the next if he'll be treated with warmth, hostility, or respect, which ones will prove to be his saviors or his enemies. And Moland captures the increasing strangeness of Binh's serial environments with subtle, yet telling compositions—from the natural tranquility of a Vietnamese rice paddy, to the stifling cargo hold of a ship, to the concrete and fluorescent netherworld of New York City at night.

Tim Roth adds a note of steely, mercurial menace as the freighter captain, and the great New Zealand actor Temuera Morrison is his unscrupulous partner in crime. Nick Nolte delivers a note of scruffy integrity at the end of Binh's journey. But the story belongs to Nguyen's intrepid Binh, determined to forge a future out of the fragments of his past.

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY With Damien Nguyen, Bai Ling, Tim Roth, and Nick Nolte. Written by Sabina Murray. Directed by Hans Petter Moland. A Sony Classics release. Rated R. 125 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, August 4, 2005