Nolte Commands Emotional Country Beautifully

Young Binh (Damien Nguyen) lives in a small village outside of Saigon with a foster family, treated like a slave and worked like a mongrel dog just because he’s the child of a Vietnamese woman and an American GI. He’s a “boi doi,” less than dirt, and in the eyes of everyone around him this strangely tall man with unusual facial features is worthy of nothing more than angry downcast contempt.

When his foster mom remarries Binh learns his real mother Mai (Thi Kim Xuan) is still alive and it is strongly suggested that it would be better off for everyone involved if he journeyed into Saigon and lived with her. Intrigued by this advice, he does just this and is surprised to find himself warmly received into Mai’s life, becoming fast friends with his preschool age half-brother Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh) while gaining employment as a domestic in the bourgeois home of Mrs. Hoa (Anh Thu). But after an unfortunate accident leaves one person dead with their blood covering her son’s hands, Mai has no choice but to send Binh and Tam away on a hopeful journey to America in search of her long-lost soldier husband maybe still living somewhere in the Texas heartland.

Thus begins a quest taking Binh from his home in Vietnam, to the dank and dirty Malaysian refugee camps, to the underground sweatshops of New York, finally coming to an end in the endlessly dry and dusty plains of West Texas. Enduring great tragedy and extreme hardships, Binh becomes single-minded in his push to make it to America, firm in is belief everything can be made right if he can only be reunited with the father he’s never known. But the reality is much simpler than that, years of psychological abuse impossible to erase with a single familial hug. Still, maybe things will work themselves out after all, Binh ending up with the one thing he never could have expected, a home.

The new independent feature “The Beautiful Country” by Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland is an episodic adventure covering the entire globe with the greatest journey taken conducted completely on the inside. It is a highly emotional fable, but that emotion is completely introspective. It is a demanding picture, one requiring great patience on the part of its audience equally apt to infuriate just as many people as it enthralls.

When you consider the film is partially the brainchild of reclusive genius Terrence Malick, none of this should come as a surprise. People used to having things spelled out for them and laid out clearly with bright blinking neon signs are probably going to be lost after the first fifteen minutes. If anything, Sabina Murray’s screenplay is about as cryptic as things like this can get, everything revolving around this melodrama completely hinging upon both the actors’ performances and the skills of director of photography Stuart Dryburgh because it is so inherently internal. In the end, they all respond magnificently, Moland building things delicately to a shatteringly stirring climax ranking as one of the most psychologically palpable I’ve seen this year.

Everyone in “The Beautiful Country” shines. The episodic nature of the piece does not allow actors to slowly develop their characters over time. Instead, they must present themselves fully formed, complete individuals we know and understand from the briefest first initial glimpses. Tim Roth, Bai Ling and Temura Morrison do just this and more, each giving performances so richly shaded they deserve their own story. Roth, in particular, is sublime as a ship captain trafficking in human cargo. So tired, he knows the nut he’s stuck cracking is not the one he imagined it would be when he started out. Even so, while he doesn’t like it it’s still his life, and with the briefest brushstrokes Roth makes you believe all it’s all he can really do at this stage in his life.

On a technical level there is rarely a missed or false step. Dryburgh films things spectacularly, “The Beautiful Country” subtly changing shades and tones the closer Binh gets to the end of his journey. Taking a page from Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” editor Wibecke Rønseth cuts the picture seamlessly, his steady hand allowing for a dreamlike verisimilitude casting things like a tearfully backbreaking nightmare. Best of all, acclaimed composer Zbigniew Preisner’s melodiously ethereal score. The music carries the audience from start to finish; compelling Binh forward even as the world around him tragically self-destructs.

Still, like all three of Mallick’s pictures and Moland’s own Icelandic epic “Zero Kelvin,” this isn’t an easy movie for an audience to watch. Especially after an unexpectedly brutal turn of events during the third act, trying to understand why this is so important to Binh in light of all the pain and sacrifice is difficult to understand. For much of the 125-minute running time, everything is so unrelentingly internalized it isn’t until the very end it all almost magically clicks together, virtually slapping viewers across the face with its emotional resonating firepower.

Quite frankly, none of this would matter a single bit without Nguyen in the lead role and the great Nick Nolte making an astonishingly potent appearance towards the end. Both are extraordinary, giving the picture a weight and majesty if just wouldn’t have otherwise achieved. Nguyen is the piece’s heart and soul, his constantly piercing gauze impossible to resist. As for Nolte, his blind handyman ranks right up there with some of the finest work the cinematic icon has ever done. There is a scene, very late in the story, where a flash of painful recognition crosses his worn and haggard face. This moment is heartrending, almost too much to bear, but just as quickly it vanishes as the character realizes he can’t change the past for either himself or Binh. The only thing to do is to go on, and over a bit of coffee and a little hard work maybe that can just be the case.

While I’m pretty sure audiences attracted to warmed-over drivel like “The Fantastic Four” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” aren’t going to make the effort to respond – let alone see – something like this, personally I found “The Beautiful Country to be downright splendid. It may not be an easy sit, but then who said anything worthwhile and borderline brilliant had to be?

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)