"The Beautiful Country" has an epic bearing, but a trite and troubled script makes it more a visual tirade than an engaging odyssey. Norwegian director Hans Petter Molan condenses a Vietnamese man's search for his American father to a sketchy two hours, not nearly enough time to flesh out the characters or develop the themes.

The story begins in South Vietnam, where Binh, the son of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, is ostracized by the rural community. They call him "Bui Boi" (less than dust) and he is not even allowed to eat at the table of the relatives who have raised him. Binh bicycles to Saigon in search of his mother, Mai, who works as a domestic servant for a callous woman whose lecherous son may be the father of her second child, Tam.

Despite an awkwardly amateurish performance by newcomer Damien Nguyen as Binh, these opening scenes are full of promise. Set in 1990, they define the anti-American bitterness pervading postwar Vietnam. When an accident forces Mai to put her sons on a boat for America, the film begins to lose credibility. The first sight of land is not America at all, but Malaysia, where Binh and Tam are interred in a refugee camp.

They are befriended by Ling (Bai Ling), an

industrious prostitute who is saving for a boat ticket to New York. Although the camp is described by fellow inmates as a savagely inhumane place from which there is no escape, Ling manages to maintain herself with high-end cosmetics and a stylish wardrobe that provides nine costume changes in 12 minutes.

This second leg of the journey offers the geographical implausibility of a non-stop trip from Malaysia to New York. It comes complete with requisite disasters, including a storm, a murder and little Tam's death from fever. With the developing romance between Binh and Ling given priority over the relationship between brothers, Tam's death elicits no more sympathy than would the removal of any other character who had become extraneous to the plot.

A rivalry between ship commander Captain Oh (Tim Roth) and Snakehead (Temuera Morrison), overseer of the human cargo, has little purpose besides giving the two English-speaking actors a reason for their top-billing. After a confusing term of indentured servitude in New York, Binh hits the road in search of his father, Steve, played by Nick Nolte with the measured uncertainty of a gentle but wary recluse.

These last scenes bear the imprint of producer Terrence Malick who, had he directed, may have delivered the definitive epic on the plight of Amerasians in the wake of the Vietnam War.