Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Sheldrake back from the void to voice his opinion on THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY. He goes very, very, very, very indepth... you'll feel like you've seen a Terrence Malick director's cut after finishing this sucker. Good luck!
THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
A film by Hans Petter Moland
Produced by Terence Malick and Edward R. Pressman
Screenplay by Sabina Murray
Story by Sabina Murray and Lingard Jervey
Sony Pictures Classics 2005
125 minutes
June 11th, 2005. Sheldrake here, back from taking a short, but complete, mental vacation, during which he vacated his mental. He’s happy to report that the landmark location of his mind has newly installed supports and riggings that are up to spec and a healthy tenant maintaining the famous premises, and no one under thirteen was maimed emotionally during the making of this bed that I now have to lie down and sleep in.
Today we’re reporting from the hot and humid midtown streets of New York, around 54th and Sixth Avenue
One woman there was of Korean descent, and I believe her parents were from that country; a second young lady was descended from, and I hope I’m right here, Chinese parentage—forgive me if that’s wrong—and I am of English, French and Irish stock— forgive me if that’s wrong—and the first American Isbell, Robert, had a land grant in Massachusetts in 1620 (from whom has always been my question). My point being, that we all have very different stories to tell about how our families ended up in this part of the world—in America—as opposed to where the celery stalks had first sprouted. America was not for any of us there last night a destination, it was just Where We’re From, but for SOMEONE nearer the bottom of the family tree, it was an idea, then a goal, then a destination and a journey. And what it meant to each of them was, I think, a little different.
So the film tonight, had to mean something a little different to each of us there. There were others there of varied descent, whose ancestors had all arrived in America at different times in its development, and all the new arrivals had had the common problem of both learning how to live here, and how make the people who were already here let them live here—in other words, each new immigrant wave changes the basic underlying story, and, as any project manager knows, there has to be a buy-in for the new story, managed or not. All together now: “That is America, to me--a faith, a home, a family…something something…Dem-AKH-CRAH-SEE..” The Ellis Island POV, for example, is not mine own, but always sounds to me like someone else’s story. I assume the story of the Pilgrim’s arrival (“FRISTYS” to all you talkbackers) has the same effect on others, or maybe not—trying to figure out someone else’s personal hermeneutics on the OBJETS D’HISTOIRE left lying around the intellectual and cultural landscape (thanks, R.G. Collingwood) is a guessing game, and it’s usually easier just to ask them. Or bone up on your Hans George Gadamer, which I recommend doing anyway. (TWO Western Intellectual History superhero references. Ok, that’s it, we’re TAKIN’ IT UP A NOTCH.)
THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY is the grand epic story of the journey of the son of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier (a “bui doi” – “less than dust”), born in perhaps 1967 or 1968, and his journey in 1990 to America, through New York to Houston. Nick Nolte’s production company put this one together, and it’s a beautifully made movie, a classic epic with a deep understanding of its form—let’s get to that in a minute. The lead actor, Damien Nguyen, gives his debut performance as BINH, the man whose story we join when he is about 27. He’s living in the place where he was born, in a little vietnameless shanty somewhere in Viet Nam, in a communal group of the poor, the sort of ragtag group of lost souls who cling together because no one else will have them – that’s the place of the bui doi in Vietnamese society, the same way a kid with severe acne ends up in the dopers group by default in a public high school. When his friend marries, the place is suddenly plus one as far as the rest of Binh’s roomies are concerned, and he takes to sleeping outside in an open boat, monsoon or no monsoon. Of the few things that come to him from his family, one of them is a small picture of his young handsome American father and pretty Vietnamese mother. He hears she might still be in Saigon. Shit. She’s still in Saigon. So picture in hand, off he goes to the Big City to look for Mom, whom he finds, along with his little brother Tam. He and Tam escape with Mom’s help to Malaysia, where they pick up Bai Ling, the beautiful Chinese woman in the hot leather in SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. Here’s my favorite line from Bai Ling’s IMDB bio: “When she was 14 she enlisted in the Chinese People's Liberation Army where she spent three years in a performance troop entertaining soldiers stationed in Tibet.” Wow. Take THAT, Katie Holmes who, unlike Brooke Shields, DOES take advice from someone who really believes in Aliens. Anyway. Eventually, all roads in this movie lead to America, where Dad still lives, maybe, and that’s the rest of the movie’s story.
Nyugen’s performance is a fine one, as blank as—well, as Martin Sheen’s as Willard in AN, and it’s what’s required here. The story is an Odyssean epic, Telemachus in search of his dad, right? And in an epic, the hero has to spend a lot of time staring at strange new things with a “what the hell is THAT?” look on his face. Epics are a funny structure (and thanks to John Truby’s great cassette tapes that taught me about this). The structure is basically two part: The Road (or the River) and, the second part is a series of episodes that happen on the road, all of which might as well begin “The Damnedest Thing Happens”, and there’s a new character at the center of each one. So on Binh’s journey, we go on The Search For Mom, which takes place in the big house where she works as a Maid, then The Escape to Malaysia with his little brother Tam, where Bai Ling enters the story, then Nasty Across the Ocean to America on a ship whose job is to gather up cheap workers in the third world and sell 'em to the States. This was my favorite episode’ cause Jango Fett is in it— Temuera Morrison as the civilian businessman trading human cargo—and Mr. Orange. Tim Roth is the Captain of the ship, and he turns in yet another great nuanced performance in the role of a man who dwells in-between the humane and the inhumane, a man who would LIKE to have human lives mean more to him than they do, but, oh, well, life goes on, that’s the not the deck of cards he’s been dealt, as Jango learns when he suggests that perhaps the accumulating deaths in the cargo, reducing their profit, should come from the Captain’s half. The Captain sternly deplores the suggestion. Too, the head passenger villain aboard the boat is one nasty drunk, clear glass bottle of vodka always at his side.
Next episode: Forget Her, Binh, It’s Chinatown, where Binh and Ling show up indentured in New York—WOO HOO!—on Pell Street, Binh chopping vegetables and Ling “entertaining”, until someone lets him know, uh, dude, you’re Dad was American, so, like, you’re already a citizen. D’OH!
That scene that I just mentioned is the key to this movie, and it’s a powerful one. In an epic, the journey must be brutal, and long, the hero must lose everything that matters to him, it all has to be burnt away, a different part in each episode, he must have nothing, nothing at all, by the time he arrives at journey’s end, because the epic is an elegant question: was the cost of the journey, was it WORTH IT, finding this treasure you were looking for. Look at what you lost. Look at what it cost everyone around you. What you did to yourself. How it changed you.
Was it worth it?
It’s about life, you see. All this…stuff…happens to us, and we lose things we thought would be with us forever, we find out things about ourselves, about others, we wish we’d never known…our strengths, our weaknesses, their failures and betrayals…
Was it worth it?
And the treasure you get is never the one you sought. You get what you need, not what you wanted.
Was it worth it?
And the answer always is, must be, has to be, yes.
Yes. Sometimes you spit it out in the demon god’s face, along with a few bloody teeth, but, yes, I said, yes, I will, yes. Life will find a way etc.
Then Episode Six: Return To The Houston where we meet ol’ Nick Nolte workin’ for two bucks an hour, and he’s overpaid, out on some corner of a tumbledown West Texas ranch. It’s great seeing Nolte up on screen playing Binh’s dad. He plays a man who, it turns out, has been suffering an unimaginably terrible fate, the one explanation that makes the son’s road to the father possible. And the lovely last scene reflects on one the scenes where Binh earlier looked former his mother, and reunites the family by the images chosen.
A random.
This movie is savvy about its images, and about how Viet Nam looks in movies, so the first shot makes you go, whoa, we’re going Up the River, Kurtz Country, and then damned if they don’t quote the Larry Fishburne-with-blaring American music-radio scene. It’s a masterful move, settling their score with the prior film before marking out their own imaginative imagistic space for their own story. The world’s become a WAY smaller place since APOCALYPSE NOW was made, and it’s no longer cool to view Vietnamese as weird mystical poet warriors or whatever blotter acidy thing they were in Coppola’s film. These Vietnamese go to work and eat out Asian a lot—spicy noodles, seasoned rice cakes and chicken with bean sprouts. The food cart scenes reminded me of nothing so much as the first Dekker scenes in Blade Runner (“Tell him I’m eating.” I knew the lingo. Every good cop did. That scene.) Or maybe Chinatown on a Saturday night.
Another random.
One of the interesting technical issues the film has to deal with is its transition into English as it movies from episode to episode on the epic journey. English, the language, is nearly a character in the movie, or perhaps a supermodel, it’s sent down the runway in so many uniforms, gowns and cute little black numbers. It’s very prêt-a-porte English, but you can and will find it wearable in any number of common social situations.
In other words, English qua English is made to work in the movie, it carries value and weight nearly every time it’s used. It brings you in, makes you slave if you have the wrong accent, makes you a captain or a doctor if you have the right accent.
One of the most aggressive and PoMo moves in the dialogue is the game that’s played for food and water. The two contestants sit across from each other and throw American iconic names back and forth at each other. There are two ways to lose. You can’t come up with an appropriate response, you do a Kwyjibo challenge and you’re wrong. This works as a game in the movie and as a miniaturization of the real commercial contest they’ll face in America, where they’re ability to obtain f. and w. will be dependent on their mastery of the language and culture.
Nice to have have the cheese back on my cracker. This sanity you speak of. I cannot touch it or feel it, and yet it is there.
Sheldrake,
NY NY
