The Beautiful Country (Movie Impressions)

I saw The Beautiful Country yesterday at Tinseltown (which, by the way... on second thought, I'll save this rant for another day).

It follows the story of Binh (Damien Nguyen), child of a Vietnamese mother and an American GI, as he searches for his mother, and then for a life in America. And while some loose threads are unresolved by the end, the final scene is very satisfying.

I did, however, have 2 problems with the movie.

Being Vietnamese myself, I understood most of the Vietnamese dialog and can say with some authority that the subtitling was terrible. If it was only couple lines here and there I would have forgiven it, but for the majority of the first act, Vietnamese was the only language spoken. I understand that translations are inherently difficult, especially going from languages that are completely unrelated. Differing idioms, sentence structure, and wordplay wreak havoc when trying to do a translation true to the original. Often what you end up with is something that is either all too literal to the meanings of individual words, or something that has taken a few liberties to try and maintain the spirit and convey the same meaning of the original work. What we had in The Beautiful Country was neither.

Most all lines were streamlined and simplified to 2 or 3 word sentences. Some lines took a lot of strayed so far from the actual spoken words that I had to scratch my head. And other lines weren't subtitled at all.

I've heard of bad dubbing/translations before, but what I don't understand is how this could happen when the people credited with the writing and directed are all Caucasion.

The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that the writers had some brief notes that were given to a Vietnamese dialog specialist to flesh out, and through miscommunication or time/budgetary concerns, those brief notes ended up being used as the subtitles.

The other problem I had was with a certain plot element. What kind of crazy ship sails from Malasia to New York, fricken New York. Instead of going across the Pacific to some sane destination like Los Angelos, let's take the scenic route below Africa and across the Atlantic. If the writers really wanted to have Binh in New York (although the story didn't really need New York. Any major metropolitan city in America would have sufficed), have the boat land on a Pacific Rim dock and then have the slave trucks drive him over.

Okay, maybe a third problem is that I don't understand people's fascination with China-Doll type women. Don't understand it, probably never will.

Other than these two (and a half) points, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. A friend said it was too slow paced, but I thought the pacing was fine. It's a drama, not a popcorn-action flick. Be glad it wasn't Dragonball Z proportions of epic sucky pacing.