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The Quiet American
**1/2
Cinema Releases - November 29, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15.
USA/Germany/Australia. 100 minutes. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Written by
Christopher Hampton, Robert Schenkkan; Graham Greene. Starring Michael Caine,
Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Serbedjiza, Tzi Ma, Robert Stanton,
Holmes Osborne, Quang Hai.
"The Quiet American" takes place
in Vietnam, 1952. The French and Communists were battling it out, but the
American troop escalation had not yet begun. Michael Caine plays Thomas Fowler,
a cynical British journalist who has little interest in politics and likes
to stay detached. Brendan Fraser is the title character, an open-faced but
distant young aid worker, who may be what he seems to be, or may not, but
who knows?
The film opens with Fraser dead and Caine telling
his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen) about the assassination.
"How?" she asks. "Stabbed," replies Caine. A moment of silence, before she
notes, "He loved me." Caine was unable to marry his woman because of a Catholic
wife back home who refused to grant a divorce. Fraser had offered to marry
Phuong instead, not only because he loved her, but because he wanted to protect
her. That's just the way his mind worked.
It's hard to go further into the plot without
revealing surprises, and pretty hard anyway, because I'm not exactly sure
what this movie thinks it is about. I have not read the famously controversial
Graham Greene novel upon which Phillip Noyce's film is based, but I have
very recently seen the 1957 film version directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
and maybe that's the problem. While Noyce's film is plain-spoken, with hot,
colourful, breathing photography and clearly emotional music cues, the Mankiewicz
version was filmed in calm black-and-white and featured literate, intelligent
dialogue. The characters did not just speak their thoughts, but challenged
each other with the kind of flowing, detailed speech that has long departed
Hollywood conversation. And the film's ending tipped off its own ideas about
the British reporter and the quiet American, and who was pathetic, and
why.
Noyce's ending is supposedly closer to that of
the original book, and fair enough, but the material plays out without much
feeling of context. The Caine character decides that he has had enough of
the suffering of Vietnam, and will do something about it, but what exactly
is motivating his conversion? There is a scene where he sees a bomb attack
up close and gets rather shocked, and while Caine makes the shock believable,
the film does not convince us that it should provoke his character into a
change of heart about his role in Vietnam. In the Mankiewicz film, we saw
how Michael Redgrave convinced himself of growing unease with the violence
in Vietnam because that enabled him to attack Audie Murphy, who was moving
on Redgrave's girl. That's not the case here, because Yen plays the love
interest with boring solemnity, and the Caine and Fraser contest over her
seems functional without function.
Are we supposed to admire what the Caine character
ultimately does, or not? Do the movie's twists make it about the interfering
nature of American foreign policy? Is Fraser a villain, a misguided soul,
the better alternative to what America ultimately did in Vietnam or even
perhaps a victim of misinterpretations? I have no idea, and that's why this
movie did not work for me. Perhaps we're missing something: The Internet
Movie Database lists the US running time at two hours, but the version being
released over here lasts for 100 minutes.
There are undoubtedly some fine features in "The
Quiet American". Noyce, a skilled action filmmaker who made a stunning transition
to serious material with the recent "Rabbit-Proof Fence", pieces together
photography and music in a manner that brings powerful life to the Saigon
of the early '50s. Caine gives a performance of frankness and strength without
the speeches or forthright gestures that usually accompany his dramatic roles.
Yet as a whole the movie feels formless. Sorry to repeat myself, but what
is it about?
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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