Roland Neveu / Sony Pictures Classics
Nguyen and Ling star in the undeniably beautiful Country.
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The Beautiful Country
Opens Fri., July 15, at Metro
Indie über-producer Ed Pressman and cult director Terrence Malick are responsible for this skimpy film on an epic subject, the watery trek of a half-American Vietnamese boy to his GI dad's homeland, known in Vietnamese as "the beautiful country." I've never heard of the Oslo director they hired, Hans Petter Moland, and don't particularly want to hear from him again.
And yet, Country's important story does exert a certain fascination. It's best in its earliest scenes, Vietnam's poorer quarters as seen by a young half-Yankee teen, Binh (Damien Nguyen), known to his fellow citizens as "pig face" or "less than dust." After a tragic accident at a ritzy mansion where his mother cleans house, the 17-year-old flees with his toddler brother via a leaky boat to a prisonlike Malaysian refugee camp, then buys their way aboard a sinister freighter piloted by a half-moral captain (Tim Roth) and a subhuman trafficker, Snake Eyes (Temuera Morrison, Cmdr. Cody from Revenge of the Sith). En route, the refugees play a pop-culture game akin to Trivial Pursuit, I guess as a commentary on the hollowness of the culture they've risked all to reach.
After a hackneyed shipboard showdown or two, Binh's off to an oppressed workers' subterranean dorm in New York's Chinatown and a job as an overworked busboy. His pal from the voyage, Ling (Bai Ling), longs to be a singer. Forced into prostitution back in Saigon to pay her (and Binh's) way over, she doesn't fare much better at a karaoke joint frequented by Wall Street assholes. Disillusioned by Ling's fate and shocked by the revelation that he had been legally entitled all along to a free trip from Vietnam to America, so that his entire ordeal was needless, Binh lights out for Texas to find his blind Viet-vet dad (Nick Nolte).
The story gets steadily less credible as Vietnam recedes (and talk about a beautiful country!), while all the subsequent scenes of flight and relocation seem filched with a tired hack's hand from the film cliché file. Nolte's role makes no sense, and he delivers his usual pocketful of mumbles. But the plight of mixed-race kids like Binh is real, and Nguyen's performance is vivid. (R) TIM APPELO
Genesis
Runs Fri., July 15–Thurs., July 21, at Varsity
Darwin would not be pleased about the current state of nature documentaries; they're undergoing some kind of population explosion, like lemmings, without regard to fitness or survival. Close on the heels—fins? feathers?—of Deep Blue and March of the Penguins, this French account of life's origins on Earth begins with an old black guy in a fire-lit cave: our narrator, since apparently they couldn't afford Morgan Freeman, or because he doesn't speak French. "My story is the history of the universe," he says. Oh, really? I didn't know we were living in a cave. And we're certainly not all solemn and French. Anyway, these passages of narration are like being stuck in the cellar with Tim Robbins in War of the Worlds—you'll do anything to escape, even if it means being gobbled up by a tripod. But, since his subject is how we're all formed out of the intergalactic dust and primordial ooze, evolving into more and more complex organisms with a hunger to survive, there's plenty of gobbling. Amoeba eat amoeba, fish eat crustaceans, lizards eat bugs. In this way, if it weren't for the boring old cave dude, Genesis would make for a fine school field trip—provided the curriculum is down with Darwin, not with Cardinal Christoph Schönborn or Seattle's wacky Discovery Institute. "Chaos," not intelligent design, is the operative principle at work.
Unsurprisingly from the makers of Microcosmos (1996), the best sequences here feel like Microcosmos 2—which is to say, everything that happens when the cave guy isn't around. The cinematography can be amazing, as when marine iguanas are head butting one another for the right to mate; or as sea horses snap at their prey in seaweed forests; or when a determined snake swallows an egg about three times its girth. You'd love to see this stuff on an IMAX screen—but, again, without the cave dude. (G) BRIAN MILLER
Happy Endings
Opens Fri., July 15, at Guild 45
You could consider Don Roos' new comedy the airbagged alternative to Crash—a whole bunch of nutty Los Angelenos, careeningly connected, lives in tumult, yet nothing really bad happens. And he lets you know that straightaway. The film opens with Lisa Kudrow running from some unknown distress when—bang!—she's hit by a car. In the first of many title cards he uses throughout Happy Endings, Roos assures us: "She's not dead." He'll continue the device through the rest of his overlapping stories, commenting directly on the action, adding back story (and future story) to his characters, making little jokes. It's too much—like experiencing the DVD commentary track before you're even done with the flick, an assertion of authorial control one associates more with literature or Godard movies. But Roos is sweet, not sour (or profound) like Godard, and he basically wants you to like everyone in his film, right down to the schemers, hustlers, and tramps.
