The Quiet American

After the recent success of 'Rabbit Proof Fence' comes another British release from the versatile Australian director Philip Noyce - 'The Quiet American', adapted from Graham Greene's novel by writer Christopher Hampton ('Dangerous Liaisons'). Noyce made his name in Hollywood with political thrillers like 'Patriot Games' and 'Clear and Present Danger', films which subtly questioned the American Intelligence community and American foreign policy. These themes are also to be found in 'The Quiet American', but it is a more mature, contemplative work, shifting the focus from action to character, and concerned not only with politics, but with the human condition.

Michael Caine stars as Thomas Fowler, a London Times journalist posted in French-occupied Vietnam, who lives with a much younger local woman, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen). Fowler would like nothing more than to be able to continue living with Phuong, but his laziness, and the lack of noteworthy events in Saigon, raise the constant threat of a recall to London (and to his Catholic wife, for whom divorce is out of the question). Then into Fowler's life steps Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), the quiet American of the title, an idealistic young man claiming to be in Vietnam on a humanitarian mission to treat trachoma, who wants nothing more than to save the Vietnamese. Fowler and Pyle become good friends, united by their love for Vietnam and a common veneer of gentility in a world where foreigners tend to be loud, drunken buffoons. It soon becomes apparent that they also share a love for the same woman, as well as a carefully masked capacity to deceive, and to endorse acts of the most cold-blooded barbarity, in order to get what they want.
Despite Fowler's complexities both as a character and as a narrator trapped between romanticism and cynicism, Michael Caine manages to capture his decadence perfectly. Brendan Fraser is also excellent as Pyle, in a clever piece of casting which leaves the viewer uncertain as to whether he is the kind of lightweight character normally played by Fraser (in e.g. 'The Mummy' or 'Bedazzled'), or whether his modest reserve conceals greater depths.

With a plot involving US paranoia about foreign 'enemies', the improvident supply by the US of arms and training to highly suspect local despots, and the greenlighting by the US of some terrorist actions even as it roundly condemns others, this is clearly a very political film which, despite its setting in Indochina in the late 1950s, has all sorts of uncomfortable resonances for the state of international affairs today. Yet by concentrating upon the relationship between Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong (who in different ways comes to symbolise Vietnam for both men), Noyce manages to collapse all distinctions between the political and the personal, creating a drama that is as compelling as it is critical.
Highly recommended.

Anton Bitel, 09.09.2002