Epic offers a moving experience
''Bui doi" is Vietnamese slang for children whose fathers were American GIs. It means ''less than dust," and it is not used in kindness. ''The Beautiful Country," an ambitious international epic of displacement and refugee yearning, presents us with a young man who is less than dust at the start but who slowly grows in stature. By the final scenes, he's a hero more real and more touching than any you may encounter at the movies this year -- big enough to just overcome the slickness of the film that surrounds him.
His name is Binh, and as played by newcomer Damien Nguyen in a performance of immense and quiet power, he's a nonentity scorned by his adopted family in a rural village. Tall and shaggy, with an unexplained scar on his upper lip, Binh barely speaks; he could be the local idiot for all we know. His prized possession is a tattered snapshot of his Vietnamese mother and American father standing outside a Saigon barbershop, and when he's booted from his home, he travels to the city seeking answers. The year is 1990, a decade and a half after the Fall, and Binh is an adult even if no one acknowledges him as such.
He finds his mother (Chau Thi Kim Xuan) quickly enough -- she's a housemaid for a wealthy family -- but their reunion is short-lived, and Binh is forced to head for the coast with his toddler half-brother Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh) in his care. His goal: Houston, where his father was last heard from. His first roadblock: a refugee camp in Malaysia, where the dispossessed check in and never check out.
Directed by Norwegian filmmaker (and Emerson College grad) Hans Petter Moland, ''The Beautiful Country" has the epic scope of Oliver Stone's 1993 Vietnamese saga ''Heaven & Earth," and some of its problems as well. Aided by the talented cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (''The Piano"), Moland comes up with deliriously lovely images -- shots whose prettiness acts as a gloss on the toughness his story needs.
The film becomes even more bipolar when Binh and Tam meet Ling (Bai Ling), a refugee from North China who unapologetically trades her body for cash and favors from the camp guards. No slight to the actress or her perfectly fine performance, but she is simply too glamorous to be believable in the role; as soon as she opens her mouth to speak, those perfect teeth give the game away. The romance that sprouts between the stolid Vietnamese and this hooker with the heart of gold never feels less than concocted.
The screenplay by Sabina Murray (based on a story by her and Lingard Jervey) gets back on firmer ground, paradoxically, when Binh, Tam, and Ling take passage on a freighter smuggling immigrants to the United States in exchange for a year of indentured servitude. The hellishness of the journey feels real, and Tim Roth as the ship's smart, unfeeling captain gives an outside perspective on both the plight of the boat people and Binh's own prospects. Here is where the character begins to come into his own, and the captain is the first to notice. ''You have an independent mind," he tells the watchful young man. ''Some people admire that. I don't."
It is entirely to Nguyen's credit that we come to admire and cheer on Binh's ''independent mind." In the new world, he is resourceful, hopeful, and through a revelation that deflates much of what he has been through, undone. Finally, he is cast away, moving through the byways of middle America toward his unknown father.
Binh has learned enough English to converse with whomever he meets, but he still doles his sentences out sparingly, knowing better than to give the full measure of himself. He shares it with fellow illegals but silently waits for white people to show their hands.
''The Beautiful Country" remains a more commercial -- and thus more compromised -- version of similar immigrant sagas, 1983's ''El Norte" and ''In This World" (2002) among them. The movie's heart and central performance are very much in the right place, though, and when Binh at last finds what he's looking for, the filmmakers bank against their impulse toward melodrama and deliver a reconciliation that is heartbreakingly understated. In so doing, they say volumes about this one Amerasian and the thousands of people he stands for.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
