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BY PETER KEOUGH
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125 MINUTES | JANE PICKENS Charles Dickens would be embarrassed by the shameless melodrama indulged in this tract about human trafficking from director Hans Petter Moland (Aberdeen) and screenwriter Sabrina Murray. It’s Vietnam in the 1990s, and poor Binh (Damien Nguyen) bears the shame of the American failure on his face. Left to the mercy of his cold-hearted relatives by his GI father (Nick Nolte), he starts out eating scraps in the yard, and it’s all downhill from there. After he tracks down his mother, who’s working for some nouveau aristocrats in "Saigon," a ridiculous accident has him joining the boat people, where Tim Roth is a nihilistic ship captain. Will Binh ever track down his father, who’s living somewhere in Texas? The answer is less of interest than the sentimentally sadistic hardships he endures along the way, many of which have him seething as the women he loves are subjected to rape and prostitution. The Beautiful Country is the polar opposite of Michael Winterbottom’s pseudo-vérité and more powerful In This World, but both in their way are equally fraudulent.
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