2.34:1 DVD capture: The Beautiful Country The DVD

Buy the BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY poster at Moviegoods (click on image) THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada Sony presents The Beautiful Country on DVD in a handsome 2.34:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The studio's 'scope titles are usually plagued by edge enhancement, but this one emerges from the telecine suite with nary a hint of it. There is, in fact, something coldly immaculate about the image; it inspires only a jaded shrug. Featuring crisp, audible dialogue and doing well by a relatively modest soundmix that places most of the ambience up front, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is equally adept. Extras include a feature-length commentary from director Hans Petter Moland and a 20-minute Q&A with screenwriter Sabina Murray. The former is very dry: Moland fixates on character motivation, which finds him taking the pretentious but no less easy route to narrating the movie. Aside from an interesting detour into his time in New York as a location scout for music-video pioneer Bob Giraldi, there's nothing here as penetrating as our own interview with the filmmaker. Meanwhile, the questions posed in the aforementioned featurette by a heard-but-not-seen interrogator grow so squirm-inducingly banal (e.g. "What is your favourite scene?") that the obviously-intelligent Murray starts to look like she's twirling on a spit. Although she's not, by her own admission, cinema-savvy, she manages to provide a great deal of insight into producer Terrence Malick's involvement (certainly more than Moland ever summons) and touches on challenges we may not have considered, such as the difficulty of writing broken English that doesn't sound condescending. Trailers for Saving Face, Heights, Oliver Twist, Saraband, Sueño, and Thumbsucker round out the disc, with the Saving Face preview cuing up on startup.-Bill Chambers

The Film
excerpted from a longer review found here

Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature--of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words--so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film--even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

That's neither here nor there for the bulk of The Beautiful Country as we follow Binh (Damien Nguyen), the product of a tryst between his mother and an occupying Yankee soldier (Nick Nolte) during the Vietnam police action and an outcast due to his half-caste status. "Lower than dust" is what his foster family calls him--thus he goes on a quest to find his mother in Hanoi, a new life in Manhattan, and his father in Texas. Because this is precisely the kind of film that it is, he's saddled with an adorable younger half-brother, Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh), on the lam when a comedy of misunderstandings results in tragedy and flight from his long-lost mother's side. More, a whore with a heart of gold (Bai Ling), a smuggler captain (Tim Roth), and the captain's corrupt lieutenant (Temeura Morisson) light the way of his journey. Of course someone will turn out to be blind, this external affliction reflecting internal torment (and greasing the wheels for a none-too-subtle stab at the arbitrariness of racism), and someone else will be dead, fed to the grist of screenwriter Sabina Murray's clumsy, ham-handed finger-pecks that are at least a full measure gawkier than Binh's too-easy literal quest. (If locating a hayseed in a haystack were this easy, he could've called first.) But that's punching narrative holes in broad allegory--expecting a well-intentioned, high-minded, often too-obvious bit of social activism to resist swatting its flies with its rhetorical Cadillacs. I suspect Malick passed on this project without abandoning it because the script needed an overhaul, but for all the similarities to Malick, credit Moland--a brilliant director who doesn't need this coattail--for the few stunning images, the few thunderously understated moments, and the whispered, elliptical grace note that concludes the piece.-Walter Chaw

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