besherat What a wonderful movie it is. Hans Petter Moland made a masterpiece with this movie. I'll try to watched his another movies for sure. What a wonderful theme, what a wonderful acting, great Tim Roth in secondary role. I really like this movie. Beautiful music as well.

anhedonia One of the least attractive aspects of the American movie industry is that while crap, such as "Fever Pitch" (the remake), "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Be Cool," get millions of dollars spent on marketing and promotion and are splashed on thousands of screens, a gem like "The Beautiful Country" gets barely released. Even then, it only hits the major cities.I pretty much knew little to nothing about this film when I saw it. I vaguely recall seeing an Ebert & Roeper review of it, though I don't remember when they recommended it. What a completely wonderful surprise this one turned out to be."The Beautiful Country" is as much about the lengths to which immigrants will go to come to the United States as it is about a man's search for his father. Writer Sabina Murray (who apparently was hired by Terrence Malick and Edward R. Pressman to write a film about immigrants and came up with this idea) deftly uses Binh's (Damien Nguyen) quest as a device to depict the hardships of immigrants.What ultimately makes "The Beautiful Country" a shattering experience is its complete unpretentiousness. There isn't a single emotion in this film that isn't earned. It's as much a testament to Murray's script as it is to the performances.Nick Nolte might be the name actor in this film, but his role's relatively small. But, just as he did in "Hotel Rwanda" (2004), Nolte takes what's essentially a cameo and turns it into something memorable. He gives his character true depth.The two surprises in this film are Nguyen and Bai Ling as Ling, a sexy Chinese refugee who is willing to do anything - anything - to fulfill her dreams. This is undoubtedly the best thing Bai Ling has done. Usually cast as caricatures or in minor roles, she imbues her character with genuine feeling. We understand and feel for this woman, her struggles and her passions.Nguyen completely dominates the film. He doesn't do anything wrong. He underplays Binh so expertly, you'd think this was a veteran actor, not a novice. It's such an incredibly honest performance, you wouldn't for an instant believe Nguyen is a surfer boy from California. It's one of the year's best performances.At a time when the news media and politicians seem to be concentrating on demonizing immigrants, it's important to see a film like this, to see why people leave their homelands, endure unimaginable suffering to come here. True, the immigrants in this film aren't of Arab descent or Haitian - we all know exactly how they'd be treated. But "The Beautiful Country" is all about the beauty and ugliness of life. It's also emotionally devastating at times. And what makes the film all the more remarkable is that the gut-wrenching scenes never come across as any sort of contrivance. There's no emotional blackmail here; the actors play the scenes straight and with a gesture, a simple word, manage to bring us to tears."The Beautiful Country" is a rare treasure, a film that never cheats us, never asks for what it hasn't earned and still manages to be deeply affecting. And in keeping with the rest of the film, the final scene is simply perfect.A film like this deserves a much larger audience than it got. This is why we go to the movies.

Charles Delacroix I just saw this movie today, although it's been in release here for several weeks, I think. I was deeply moved.This is truly a beautiful movie: above all about Beauty and Ugliness. The main character, Binh, we're told very early in the movie, is Ugly; his mother is Beautiful; and the rest of the film displays a constant tension between the question What is Beauty? and the question What is Ugliness? The hooker's looks contrast sharply with Binh's. The limpid, natural beauty of Vietnam contrasts sharply with the cold, commercial ugliness of New York. The ugly interior of the ship contrasts sharply with the beauty of the sea. The culminating sequence in which Binh finds his father also says things about perception of Ugliness and Beauty that I don't think I can comment too much on without, perhaps, giving too much of the story away.The actor who played Binh was truly superb, in my opinion. Nick Nolte was excellent, but really more of a cameo; Binh is the main character in the story, and carries his persona well.I do have to note some disappointing features.First, it is perhaps natural in a movie about Vietnam not to include social commentary on ethnicity and race. Yet the 100% uniform (no exception, as far as I know) depiction of White Anglos as either racist or exploitive or both, is literally racist. I guess this kind of depiction is "PC" but if so, frankly it's time for "PC" to grow up. No one who's actually been to Texas, for example, would think that all white Texans go around calling everybody else "boy". Please. This kind of obvious inauthenticity is bound to call into question much else in the film's racial and ethnic commentary.There were some technical problems. In the open boat, when Binh awakes to find a fruit floating in the water, he looks first to his left, then to his right, and only then straight ahead to find land prominently on the horizon directly in front of him. It's a small thing but very inauthentic. People tend to look dead ahead first, not to the side. And a few other items like this too I think, can't recall offhand, but I remember noticing them at the time.But none of this detracts from the overall beauty of The Beautiful Country ... and the complex and challenging examination it poses of Beauty and Ugliness in many, many expressions. A wonderful movie.

Chris Knipp Hans Petter Moland's "The Beautiful Country" is another in a long line of coming-to-America films. This one is about a Vietnamese man who journeys arduously from Saigon to Texas to find his American father. It's a classic theme, and an important one: but fine themes and noble intentions do not a great movie make. Poorly written and edited, draggy, incomprehensible and lacking in verisimilitude (or flat-out unbelievable) in parts and disjointed, an ordeal to watch, the film -- which has some pretty images and some good acting -- is briefly but memorably saved in the last quarter hour when Nick Nolte comes in as the father and he and his son Binh (Damien Nguyen) play off each other in Texas ranch country like a couple of laconic Cormac McCarthy cowboys. Nolte certainly hasn't lost his touch; and the Vietnamese character has had a tight-lipped, stoical quality all along which now suddenly fits and harmonizes in a few quietly effective scenes. Whether it's worth it to sit through all the rest to get to this short sequence is another question.Binh, the central character, is a Vietnamese half-breed man treated brutally in his own country because, as someone fathered by an American soldier, he's regarded as "less than dust." This is true, we find, even though Binh's father married his mother -- and left her behind for reasons not his own. Each major narrative shift is punched forward by an invented-looking event. When the people Binh lives with in the Vietnamese countryside as the film begins gain another family member he's immediately ejected from the household.Binh goes to Saigon where miraculously, though his mother is a nobody working as a house servant, he quickly finds her. Life for Binh is full of Dickensian grimness with sudden strokes of good or bad fortune, and he has a perpetual hangdog look and a creeping walk with shoulders slumped and face down. There's something wrong with his lip. Everyone keeps saying he's ugly, but he's just ordinary: they either perceive him as ugly because of his Caucasian look, or because it's part of the plot. Binh immediately becomes a punching bag as a servant at the house where his mom works, and an accident makes him look guilty of a crime so serious he must immediately flee. Weepingly, his mother sends him off with her young son by somebody else, to make his way -- to America, with a small bundle of cash she's been saving. The hero ends up with his little half-brother in a Malaysian refugee camp, where he meets a resilient Chinese prostitute and would-be singer, Ling (Ling Bai), and they bond. At her urging he escapes and miraculously they are taken onto a rust-coated vessel full of desperate human cargo, a virtual slave ship, headed for America. The captain is Tim Roth, in a typically interesting, but this time wasted, performance. Things are so mismanaged on the boat that the hapless passengers die off like flies, despite a manager's pledge to lose no one since he'll be paid by the head on arrival. Life on board is a seemingly futile struggle to survive. Amid the craziness and death a fantastic game is played wherein the desperate travelers compete by calling out the names of Americana such as foods, places, or movie stars.Binh remains an implausible mixture of hangdog manner and iron will. For no clear reason Captain Oh (Roth) takes a shine to him -- but tells him he'll be out of place wherever he goes. "I know," Binh says.Finally New York comes into view -- but how the passengers are unloaded is one of many explanations the screenplay avoids providing. Binh works in a Chinatown restaurant in the indentured situation he was promised when he talked his way onto the boat -- till somebody remarks that if he has an American father, he's entitled to US citizenship. This revelation causes him to strike out cross country to seek his dad, who's supposed to be in Houston.Since Binh didn't even know where his mother was in Saigon, how he finds his father working as a ranch hand in an obscure corner of cowboy country is one more far-fetched plot twist. But we can only be grateful, if we've made it through this far, because Nolte comes in and for a quarter of an hour, creates another, better movie.Why this was directed by a Norwegian is hard to guess; one can only say that the producers, who included Terrence Malick (also credited with the film's concept) took a chance and played a long shot. Obviously when the actors are speaking Vietnamese, they were on their own. Maybe that's why everybody starts speaking broken (but in Nguyen's case, surprisingly idiomatic) English after a while. There can be no other good reason.There is no question about the fact that the writing and editing of "The Beautiful Country" are irredeemably flawed. Apart from stilted speeches, the script is marred by more fits and starts and inexplicable or incredible outcomes than can be listed here. This movie can be considered "timely" and socially significant and from that the allowances begin. It has -- or attempts -- an epic quality -- and visually it has fine moments. But the contrived screenplay and stilted dialogue make it painful viewing and an artistic disaster.