In 2002, 22-year-old Vietnamese Australian Van Tuong Nguyen, in a last-ditch effort to pay his twin brother Khoa's debts off, took a job as a drug courier which landed him on death row in Singapore after he was caught smuggling half a kilogram of heroin there. Three years later, he was hanged.
The 2013 Australian TV mini-series Better Man superbly traces his tragic story, from his experiences growing up with Khoa and their single mother Kim whose husband had left her while pregnant to his eventual fate and presents a semi-fictional but very authentic coverage of what may have happened in between. Writer-director Khoa Do does a commendably objective, compassionate and unflinching job of recreating Nguyen's story, but his instincts proved most successful in the remarkable casting. In the hugely challenging lead role, Remy Hii is just breathtaking: as we see Van from massive highs to the deepest lows, Hii is vibrant, cherubic, dangerously angry, relatably desparate and finally heartbreaking. Hii deservedly won a Logie Award for his work. As Nguyen's real-life lawyers Lex Lasry and Julian McMahon, Bryan Brown and David Wenham bring a grounding gravitas to the piece, Do's mother Hien Nguyen fits her role like a glove and Jordan Rodrigues convincingly brings the character here with the most important and obvious arc to life.
Better Man was a controversial project for Australia's Special Broadcasting Service because it was made against the Nguyen family's wishes and the real Lasry called it an "untruthful soap opera." I also knew clearly how it would end because the case was headline national news for about a month when I was in Year 12. But nonetheless, it had me genuinely gripped from the first episode until the end of the fourth and final one, and still does. I should mention, however, that during the final episode SBS aired a warning just before the final scene, which was definitely warranted. Better Man, for me, was television's crowning achievement in 2013 and is one of its highlights of this whole decade.
Better Man was a controversial project for Australia's Special Broadcasting Service because it was made against the Nguyen family's wishes and the real Lasry called it an "untruthful soap opera." I also knew clearly how it would end because the case was headline national news for about a month when I was in Year 12. But nonetheless, it had me genuinely gripped from the first episode until the end of the fourth and final one, and still does. I should mention, however, that during the final episode SBS aired a warning just before the final scene, which was definitely warranted. Better Man, for me, was television's crowning achievement in 2013 and is one of its highlights of this whole decade.
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