Grueling quest for identity

“The Beautiful Country” is a grueling epic about a young man (Damien Nguyen), born of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, who becomes determined to make his way to America and locate his father in Texas. It is a straightforward, conventional narrative, charting seemingly endless cruelty and hardship, but rewards the patient with an eloquent climactic sequence that is impossible to predict and in which Nick Nolte, arriving late in the picture, reminds viewers just what a strong, expressive presence he is.

The time is 1990, and Nguyen’s Binh is living in the countryside with a family to whom he may actually be related. He stands out for his height and his striking looks but has suffered abuse and discrimination for his mixed ancestry. His elderly foster mother -- who may in fact be his grandmother or great aunt -- tells him he must leave if her daughter is to marry, revealing for the first time that his mother, Mai (Chau Thi Kim Xuan), is alive and living in Ho Chi Minh City. A beautiful but worn woman, Mai is more slave than servant for a rich and nasty grande dame who is persuaded to take on Binh as a houseboy only to suffer a fatal accident for which Binh is sure to be blamed.

Mai just happens to know about a fishing vessel, which takes on “boat people” refugees, and presses on her son $2,000 she has saved, insisting that Binh take his little half brother Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh), whose father may well be that grande dame’s even nastier son. She also gives Binh her marriage certificate, which lists her husband’s Houston address.

Seemingly endless misery and villainy loom for Binh and Tam -- worst of all aboard a Manhattan-bound freighter. Along the way Binh meets a hooker with a heart of gold (Bai Ling), a hardened human trafficker (Temuera Morrison) and a heartless but intelligent ship captain (Tim Roth). Binh encounters kindness in hitching rides to Houston, where there’s more grief in store for him.

None of the inhumanity Binh experiences defies credibility, but writer Sabina Murray surely piles it on, and director Hans Petter Moland’s straight-ahead approach does nothing to alleviate the heavy going that makes up most of the film. To his credit, Moland knows how to change course when at last the film’s mood begins to lighten -- like the sun’s rays starting to poke through after a storm.

Newcomer Nguyen is convincingly resilient as a young man who early on learns how to live deep within himself. In its workmanlike way, “The Beautiful Country” plows through adversity like its hero -- and like him, ends up getting somewhere.

*

‘The Beautiful Country’

MPAA rating: R for some language and a crude sexual reference

Times guidelines: The film has pervasive brutality and is too intense for children

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director Hans Petter Moland. Producers Edward R. Pressman, Terrence Malick, Petter J. Borgli, Tomas Backstrom. Screenplay by Sabina Murray; from a story by Murray and Lingard Jervey. Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh. Editor Wibecke Ronseth. Music Zbigniew Preisner. Costumes Anne Pedersen. Production designer Karl Juliusson. In English and Vietnamese, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

At selected theaters.