The Quiet American was due for release just weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, but was shelved for a year over its implication of the U.S. in terrorist acts of its own. It would have met the quiet and inglorious fate of the straight-to-video release but for the lobbying of director Phillip Noyce and one of its stars, Michael Caine, and its success at last year’s Toronto Film Festival.
When Graham Greene wrote the novel in 1955 (and set it in 1952), before large-scale American involvement in Vietnam, he created in the character of Alden Pyle the prototype of the idealistic American overseas: a political naïf hell-bent on solving the world’s problems without any idea of the regional issues involved or the forces his meddling will unleash. More ominously, for Pyle and his ilk, the end always justifies the means. The term you’re thinking of is “collateral damage.”
The film is set in a Vietnam struggling against French colonial rule and is narrated by Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), an aging and cynical London Times correspondent who hasn’t filed a story in a year or so, preferring to spend his time in the company of his Vietnamese mistress Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen) and his opium pipe. “I don’t get involved,” he says. “I just report what I see.” But meeting Pyle (Brendan Fraser) sets in motion the events that will drag Fowler out of his detachment. Pyle falls in love—or something like it—with Phuong, and since he can offer her what Fowler can’t (marriage)—he proposes, with heavy allegorical overtones. As Fowler notes, “Saving a girl and saving a country would be all the same to a man like that.”
The film focuses on the love triangle rather than the political issues, which is good because not much needs to be said about the political issues now (or, maybe, everything needs to be said about them). While Greene’s novel was prophetic in its time, its bombshells (no pun intended) are now dated: CIA involvement in Vietnam isn’t news anymore, nor is the idea of something malevolent lurking behind the straightforward, there-to-help American. The idea of Pyle’s naïveté begins to seem like naïveté itself—as with most tales of lost innocence, you ask how genuine the innocence was to begin with. When Pyle, speaking on behalf of his fellow Americans, said, “We aren’t colonialists,” an audible snicker reverberated through the cinema. Pyle may be seeking a “third way” between colonialism and communism, but what he comes up with is just a sneakier, revamped colonialism.
Phuong becomes the perfect embodiment of a country caught between two rival powers, and Do imbues her with a lovely enigmatic quality and real intelligence. She is smarter and more knowing than either Fowler or Pyle, but it is her lot to have to say what they want to hear. She can choose to do so either with one of them or with a different man every night at the taxi lounge, where grabby American louts pay to dance with her; just a step up, as Pyle notes, from the whorehouse across the road.
One of the film’s beauties is that as played by Caine, Fowler, who could come across as a self-centred old lecher, convinces us he actually loves Phuong. He can’t marry her (his staunchly Catholic wife won’t grant him a divorce), and there’s a good chance that when he eventually returns to London, she’ll be right back where she started, at the taxi lounge. He’s often unscrupulous and more often uncharitable, but there’s a real pathos in the way he clings to their relationship for dear life. Fraser is good as well, although a little too knowing, which undermines the total disjunction Fowler describes between the way Pyle looks and the things he’s capable of.
Otherwise, the film stays close to its source. Faithful adaptations aren’t something I particularly understand. Why try to duplicate something that’s been done before? In this case, though, it’s a compliment, because of the film’s relevance for our times. Greene’s quiet American is much less quiet these days, but still just as questionable.
