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Green Dragon

2001, Movie, PG-13, 115 mins

Green Dragon: Review

GREEN DRAGON
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Timothy Linh Bui's follow-up to THREE SEASONS draws upon his own experiences as the child of South Vietnamese refugees for this flawed but worthy look at life in U.S. relocation camps. The film opens in April, 1975, with newsreel images of people scrambling to escape Saigon as North Vietnamese troops move ever closer. A child wakes in a darkened Quonset hut with the sounds of bomb blasts ringing in his ears. The bombs are only the remnants of a nightmare, but the sounds of the planes overhead are real: Minh Pham (Trung Nguyen) is no longer in Vietnam, but California's Camp Pendleton, one of four military bases across the U.S. converted into refugee centers for the estimated 135,000 South Vietnamese who managed to escape. It's not a prison, but until sponsorships have been secured, no one's allowed to leave without permission from Sergeant Jim Lance (Patrick Swayze), and avid photographer whose stern exterior belies a deep concern for his the refugees. Like many newcomers to the camp, Minh and his uncle, Tai Tran (Don Duong), search for their loved ones, namely Minh's mother who was left behind in Saigon but, they hope, was eventually able to leave the country. When Lance realizes that Tai speaks English, he asks him to be his camp manager; Mihn, meanwhile, meets Addie (Forest Whitaker), a cook in the camp canteen who shares Mihn's enthusiasm for comic books. Addie enlists the boy's help in finishing a large mural of a green dragon he's begun painting on blank wall, and the two become fast friends. As different as these characters may be, they're experiences are strikingly similar — both Minh and Addie have lost their mothers, Jim and Tai harbor feelings of guilt over the fate of their siblings — and they soon form bonds that transcend national differences and the horror of the recent past. Linh Bui's strategy is to introduce many characters in order to present the widest variety of attitudes possible. Many refugees are eager to embrace the myth of the American dream as the understand it, while others feel they have abandoned their country and simply want to go home. The downside is that many of these characters are hastily sketched and their stories unsatisfactorily developed (the story of the man and his two wives really deserves a film of its own), while others rely too heavily on cliches to fully register as flesh and blood characters. (In Vietnamese and English) leave a comment --Ken Fox
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