Movie review : The Quiet American
Michael Caine, playing a disillusioned, apathetic, emotionally frozen journalist in Vietnam, arrives at his office. "Anything new?" he enquires, half-heartedly.
"Corruption, audacity," his assistant replies. There is a pause lasting half a heartbeat. "I said new."
Caine plays Thomas Fowler, a correspondent for the Times, in the Saigon of 1952. The timing is precise. The French campaign is faltering, and American involvement in Vietnam - via covert support for a "third force" - is rolling out.
In the first film adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1957, Fowler was played by Michael Redgrave, and the anti-American tone of the book was trained, instead, on the Vietnamese. Mankiewicz can, perhaps, be forgiven. It was a further decade before the folly of US involvement in South East Asia became apparent, and it took a new generation of filmmakers to examine the bloody reality of the American experience.
Greene’s prescience, though, is undimmed. His anti-Americanism is revealed as something more precise: it is not Americans he disapproves of so much as the hypocrisy of the country’s foreign policy, wherein tyranny is defined as everything which is not democracy, and democracy is defended by tyrannical means.
Step up Noyce - the Australian director of the inventive Dead Calm, the energetic Clear and Present Danger and the stupid Patriot Games - who recently rediscovered his conscience with Rabbit-Proof Fence. He reinstates the book’s sceptical tone, and - as if to underline the danger of precise topicality - his film was locked in a vault after the events of 11 September made it, in the minds of timorous studio executives, unreleasable. That it has emerged now is due to the petitioning of Caine, who must have wondered if one of his finest performances had been lost to the political expediency it sought to explore.
Caine, as Fowler, starts the film in a state of emotional complacency. He describes himself as a reporter, but has only filed two reports in a year. He is not, he says, a correspondent, as the term implies a man with opinions. An opinion, he says, is a form of action. "I’m English," he says. "I have habits ... I drink tea." When the numbness thaws, he reaches for the opium pipe.
One morning, apparently by accident, Fowler encounters Pyle, an idealistic American, at a café. In the Mankiewicz film, Pyle was played by the war hero Audie Murphy. Noyce uses Brendan Fraser, a bright-faced actor whose features have the boyish softness of Tim Robbins, and who usually inhabits cartoons. (He enlivened Dudley Do-Right and George of the Jungle ).
Pyle is a mirror of Fowler’s concerns: open where he is closed, active where he is inert. The two find themselves in competition for Fowler’s Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong (Hai Yen), a former taxi dancer, who is seeking to improve her status by marrying a Westerner. Fowler has a Catholic wife in England who will not grant him a divorce. In stolen glances, it is plain that Phuong’s affections have transferred to the younger man.
Greene’s story emerges through a mist of shifting metaphor, which combines a meditation on the nature of love with an examination of political idealism. Pyle’s idealism is a mask, but his more cynical self is undermined by his attraction to Phuong. Fowler is brought back to life by romantic jealousy, and the bulk of the film is an elaborate justification for his part in Pyle’s death. "When did everything change?" Fowler muses. "Maybe there isn’t one moment."
The growing uncertainty about the role of the American is acknowledged by Fowler only in his heightened impatience and volubility. In a scene of terrible tension, he cowers in a watchtower with enemies on all sides, and finds himself comforting Pyle by explaining what Phuong will be doing at that moment. To lose Phuong, he tells Pyle, "for me, it would be the beginning of death".
The suppression of the film illustrates how dishonest we become in times of war, and it is to Noyce’s credit that his uncluttered direction explores the horrors of that state without glorying in its terror. There are explosions and severed limbs, but the chilling moments are more intimate: a dead baby shaded by a hat, a smear of blood wiped from a shoe. Only the drums on Craig Armstrong’s soundtrack - 1980s electronica in a 1950s setting - obstruct the timelessness of Noyce’s meditation.
It’s Caine’s show. He offers a cooler version of his usual insouciance. He is rakish and vulnerable, but his expression is wounded and opaque. The approaching enemy mirrors his torment, which is shown nowhere on his face.
By Alistair McKay - The Scotsman - November 28, 2002
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