The Quiet American
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Movie Reviews of The Quiet American
Movie Review: Caine Superb in Vietnamese Drama...
Summary: 5 Stars
THE QUIET AMERICAN, Phillip Noyce's adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, is among that small subgenre of films (THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, UNDER FIRE, SALVADOR) where journalists, writing in war-torn countries, discover conspiracies that undermine everything they've come to accept as true. These films are inevitably controversial, as they deal with actual places and historical events, and they demand an open mind, as they often portray governments in a less-than-flattering light. While the revelations of the stories aren't always entirely true, each film of this group are well-crafted, and certainly thought-provoking.The film is told as a flashback, as the corpse of murdered American Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) is found, floating in the Mekong, in 1952. During the French police investigation, the story unfolds...
Thomas Fowler (Oscar-nominated Michael Caine) is a veteran British journalist ("I prefer reporter," he jokes), writing in Saigon as the French fought the Communists in Indochina. Jaded and complacent, he only sporadically submits an article, devoting his time to a mildly hedonistic lifestyle, and his beloved mistress, beautiful young Phuong (portrayed by the stunning, if not overly talented Vietnamese actress, Do Thi Hai Yen). When young Pyle arrives, purportedly joining the American mission to treat eye disease among the Vietnamese, the older man is immediately impressed by his quiet, respectful, almost naive innocence. Introducing the American to Phuong, Pyle is immediately attracted to her, and, upon discovering Fowler already has a wife, in England, he begins wooing the girl, much to the chagrin of the reporter.
As his paper is threatening to return Fowler to England, taking him away from Phuong, he announces he is involved in a major story in the north, and leaves to investigate reports of Communist activities. What he finds is a massacre, with responsibility denied by both sides. Joined by Pyle ("I didn't want to propose to Phuong behind your back"), the pair barely make it back alive. Although the 'official' story blames the Communists for the deaths, Fowler doesn't believe it, and begins investigating in earnest.
A new military leader emerges, General Thé, opposed to both the French and the Communists, and Caine suspects his forces as the true perpetrators of the massacre. Visiting the elusive general's headquarters, he finds Pyle running a clinic, and the General apoplectic when he asks who is providing the arms and funds for his army. Again, with Pyle's assistance, he barely escapes with his life...and a growing suspicion that the United States is taking a less than neutral role in the intrigue...
While the film's climax will come as a surprise to no one, and the 'love triangle' lacks much spark (other than from Caine, who is totally believable when he confesses that without Phuong he would "start to die"), the film is engrossing, throughout. Brendan Fraser, as the enigmatic title character, does a very credible job in a complex role, after a somewhat shaky first meeting with Caine. The lack of chemistry between him and Hai Yen could easily be explained away as a natural reticence from her character towards any man saying "I love you", in a society where sexual favors are easily purchased. She seems far more comfortable and believable in her scenes with Caine, despite their major age difference.
Ultimately, the film is a triumph for Michael Caine, who again proves why he is one of the finest actors of his generation. As a man who goes from indifferent complacency to active participant by the film's climax, he is never less than superb.
This is certainly one of the better films of 2002!
Movie Review: The Quiet Mr Greene
Summary: 5 Stars
Two movies have been made from this book about an English journalist in Indochina in the last days of French occupation. The first movie made by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1958 starred Michael Redgrave as the writer Thomas Fowler, and war hero Audie Murphy as Alden Pyle an American technician who was really a CIA agent. The third character in Greene's novel is a Vietnamese women, Phuong who starts out as Fowler's mistress. Portraying an American as a naïve villain as in the book was not Mankiewicz' option in the backwater of the McCarthy era, so all accounts of this movie state that it portrayed Fowler as the jealous heel and Pyle as an well meaning victim of a corrupt culture. (For all I tried I could not find a copy of this film to buy or rent online or in Maryland.) Forty four years later Graham's novel of betrayal receives its proper treatment from Phillip Noyes with Michael Caine and Brendan Frasier in the leading roles. The plot in both the book and second movie centers on the triangle between the two men and the criminal interference with Vietnamese affairs by Pyle. After Pyle wins the attentions of Phuong with the help of her materialistic sister, he aids a renegade Vietnamese officer as a counterweight to the French. He arranges for the bombing of a busy Saigon street by the rebel "General" and has it blamed on the Communists. Fowler is approached to assist in a confrontation between the communists and Pyle by his assistant in the movie and a businessman fronting for the Viet Minh in the book. He arranges to meet Pyle for dinner and on the way to dinner, Pyle is murdered. Phong goes back to Fowler. The reader/viewer is left to wonder if Fowler who has regrets after being interrogated by the French Surete, objected to Pyle the political operative or the man who cuckolded him. As in the war we took over from the French nothing is simple, nothing is clear. The book ends with Fowler staying in Vietnam with Phuong and getting a divorce from his English wife. The movie alludes to this but runs a montage of Fowlers war coverage into the 1970's.
Although the Noyes movie was delayed in release by the events of 9/11 it is a timeless classic. It captures the mood of Saigon perfectly although during my tour there it was a lot tawdrier and dirty. Michael Caine is riveting as Fowler a man whose existence is moored to a beautiful dutiful woman. His reaction after Phuong leaves him for Pyle is gripping and quite public. Having been publicly humiliated by what I thought was a friend and my former spouse, I understand the depths of Thomas Fowler's feelings. To me it made Fowler's betrayal of Pyle who earlier saved his life, all the more believable. Fowler understood after a long life of being an uninvolved observer that Phuong and her sister wanted marriage with a European and that encumbered as he was he was vulnerable to a betrayal. He takes Phuong back recognizing that she does not love him nor did she love Pyle, but like the rebel General and Vietnam itself, she was up for the highest bidder. We sometimes cling to uneven relationships because we fear dying alone, so Fowler asks for and gains Phuong's return.
Graham Greene's works play in the shadow world of human emotion and the twilight of ethics and perfidy. He leaves a candle lit for his alter ego's, but the candle often flickers on the edge of extinction. He is an author for the twenty-first century.
Movie Review: A Thoughtful Excursion Into The Quagmire Of Vietnam!
Summary: 5 Stars
It looks like Deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. For those of us who slogged through the experience of Vietnam in the sixties, this superbly scripted, filmed, and produced latest version of the wonderfully ironic Graham Greene best-selling novel (an earlier black and white version made in the early 1960s starred Audie Murphy, who turned in a surprisingly professional performance) is a journey back into the heart of darkness, and a thoughtful re-examination of the surprisingly persistent contradiction that American foreign policy poses to the rest of the watching world. In terms that now have obvious parallels to our escalating involvement in Iraq, it openly questions the whole idea of the new American imperialism and how the rest of the civilized world sees it. What is even more gratifying about this film is that it gives Michael Caine yet another opportunity to flaunt his powerful acting abilities as the world weary but still committed British journalist, a man who comes to recognize both the fatal naivety and yet dangerously provocative impulses of a young and idealistic American Alden Pyle (played well by Brendan Fraser).This movie has an eerily prescient feel to it, given the fact that it was filmed and ready for distribution before 9/11, and consequently delayed for release until 2002, when the fervor of patriotic fervor over the approaching hostilities in Iraq blunted the moral sensibilities of many movie goers. In a script that is fairly faithful to the original Greene novel, one finds all of the superficial wide-eyed innocence and naivety the author found so dangerously paired with such a bland willingness toward provocative aggressive action. With unnerving calm and deliberation, Pyle sets into motion actions with calamitous consequences with a seeming child-like belief in his own ill-founded idealism and what he perceives to be the greater good that will necessarily flow from them. Needless to say, his confidence is both ill founded and wildly mistaken in its arrogant assumptions. In this sense, Pyle is the perfect allegorical representation for the dangerously irresponsible conduct of the country on whose behalf he acts.
But the real show is Caine's, whose cynical, cautious and well-constructed life suddenly crashes into overdrive, leaving him no choice but to involve himself in the dangerously escalating political situation in an attempt to fend off Pyle's efforts to cuckold him with is gorgeous young Vietnamese mistress and expose Pyle's extralegal efforts to engineer a political coup. This is a marvelously sophisticated and yet eminently entertaining film that both accurately depicts a series of fact-based events important in the history of America's involvement in Vietnam and yet also raises interesting philosophical questions by offering us a detailed character study of an individual at the very margins of his endurance, forced to fight for everything his life means to him. Enjoy!
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Movie Review: Some Times You Have to Take a Side Just to be Human
Summary: 5 Stars
Most films that deal with Vietnam show the miltary aspect of fighting men in conflict. A very few try to show the war from the inside out, what it means to retain one's inner sense of humanity even if the rest of us are losing ours. In THE QUIET AMERICAN, director Phillip Noyce portrays the Vietnam of 1952 that differed only from the next decade's American-Vietnamese conflict of virtues in that here the focus is on the French-Vietnamese version, which, as we soon see, is no difference at all. In the sweltering Saigon that suffers from daily terrorist bombs, British journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) is trying to juggle numerous personal and professional balls but keeps dropping them. He is married to a London-based wife who refuses to divorce him, forcing him to lie in order to keep his twenty-something Vietnamese mistress Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), who loves him but has to think about her future. Fowler's boss in London threatens to recall him unless he comes up with a blockbuster news story. Into this cauldron comes a medical exporting executive Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who is not what he seems to be, either morally or politically. Pyle falls in love with Phuong, who has to choose between an older man who can offer no security and a younger one who can. While all this personal angst is going on, the Vietnam around them is collapsing and is being ripped apart by the French who are exiting and the Americans who are entering. Complicating matters is that a local Vietnamese warlord is trying to establish his personal fiefdom, using illegal supplies from America. In such a climate,no one and nothing is what it seems.
Over the years Michael Caine has had many fine roles, but in his portrayal of the aging but wise journalist, he surely has one of his best. Caine's Fowler has seen politics and politicians up close, and he knows that for him to do his job, he has to maintain a professional distance. His problem is that the better he does his job the less human he becomes. His aide, a Vietnamese subtly underplayed by Tzi Ma, reminds him of this in one scene, and the audience in another. Brendon Fraser as Pyle is not the nutty or action star of his recent movies. Here is an older, more jowly, and definitely the establishment type that in earlier roles he either caricatured or ridiculed. Fraser's Pyle has his own agenda which is not limited to stealing another man's mistress.
THE QUIET AMERICAN is one of the best movies of the year because it shows how individuals caught up in a constantly changing political environment are forced to retrench so that they can relearn exactly what, at one time, must have made them feel human.
Movie Review: A Superb Film & A Gripping Performance By Michael Caine!
Summary: 5 Stars
Rarely does a novel translate well into a screen production. "The Quiet American" proves to be the exception to the rule. Philip Noyce and his team have brilliantly adapted Graham Greene's historical novel about Vietnam, during the waning days of French colonialism and the beginning of American intervention, into a powerful film. The book was published in 1955 and foreshadowed America's war in Vietnam. Kudos go to Michael Caine, who certainly deserves an Oscar for his spectacular performance.The movie is set in Saigon during 1952. Thomas Fowler, (Michael Caine), a cynical, veteran correspondent for The London Times is our narrator. Fowler has "gone native." He has fallen in love with Vietnam and with Phoung, a one-time bar hostess who is young enough to be his daughter. Enter Alden Pyle, (Brendan Fraser), a seemingly innocuous, somewhat bumbling American who supposedly works for the US Economic Aid Mission, specializing in eye diseases. The two men meet and become friends until Pyle intrudes on Fowler's love affair.
Tension builds as this triangle becomes more intense, and as the war between the French and the Communists is joined by a third party, a Vietnamese general, backed by the Americans. Fowler, who has long remained indifferent to the conflict is finally forced to take sides. Pyle is drastically transformed from a "quiet" American to a skilled CIA operator, willing to condone the deaths of innocents for long term political interests.
This is an intensely passionate film. The love both Fowler and Pyle feel for Phuong, (played by the incredibly lovely Do Thi Hai Yen) transforms both men. In one scene, when Fowler realizes his potential loss, he says, "The fear of losing Phoung is more terrifying than any bullet. If I lose her, it would be the beginning of death." And it is a film passionate about the war being fought on the streets of Saigon and in the villages. Director Noyce is able to portray the conflict in simple enough terms without taking a strong political stance. This film is anti-war not anti-American.
Graham Greene's haunting and elegant narrative comes to life here. The photography eloquently captures the steamy beauty of Saigon, the glorious tropical countryside, the serenity of Phoung's face in close-up, the chaos of a bomb-torn street and the horror of a village massacre. One of the best films I have seen in a long time. Highly recommended!
JANA