There are few better pleasures for us 30-percenters in theaters now than The Quiet American, a beautifully crafted adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. Set in Saigon in 1952, it’s gorgeously evocative – of course, I don’t know what Vietnam at the tail end of its colonial era felt like, but the film creates a vivid atmosphere.
I’m not a Michael Caine fan, but he absolutely deserves his Oscar nomination (and deserves to win) for his performance as the cynical, world-weary journalist Thomas Fowler, who luxuriates in the hermetic world of expatriates but knows it can’t last much longer. Narration is often deadly in movies, but Caine’s jaded voice-overs actually enhance the film. Tzi Ma as his assistant, Hinh, is also exceptional. Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese girlfriend, is played wonderfully by Do Thi Hai Yen. In fact, the only weak link in the cast is Brendan Fraser as the titular American, Alden Pyle. He’s good enough as the innocent Pyle, posing as an aid worker, but when his true mission for the CIA is revealed, Fraser just can’t carry off the menacing determination of the role. I kept thinking of someone like Edward Norton in his place, doing perhaps a restrained version of his schizoid role in Primal Fear.
This is the other “redemptive” film Phillip Noyce has directed recently (although he’s quoted in Movieline as saying, “My Sharon Stone film, Sliver, has as much value for me as Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American.” Damn – just when I was starting to respect him. Although he admits that “they occupy different fronts of the moviemaking spectrum”) and, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, it’s gorgeously shot by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
The story goes that Miramax wanted to shelve the film because Harvey Weinstein thought it would be perceived as anti-American. Well, Harvey shouldn’t worry, because the people who would be offended by this film – who either don’t know history or don’t understand it, or are blindly, rabidly jingoistic – are never going to see it. It’s not hard to find parallels to our current unfortunate situation: the Americans have decided that they know what’s best for the country, and they have no qualms about how they get their way. Oh, and the French are a minor annoyance and being all Old Europe and shit. And we all know how well Vietnam went, so doesn’t the future look bright? (What’s that old saying about never getting involved in a land war in Asia?) Of course, as fucked up as the Vietnam situation was, I don’t believe any US President ever announced his plan for colonizing the country and installing an American leader after the US won the war – before any war had actually started.
Well, I’d better not get started on that subject, because one of these days, when I try to think about how horribly far in the wrong direction this country is going and why nobody in “flyover country” seems to notice or care, my head is just going to explode. Pop clean off my body and go flying across the room. Or I’ll collapse; I’m exhausted already from being outraged and enraged ceaselessly since November 2000 and cursing those morons in Florida who can’t push a goddamn button on a voting machine right and Ralph Nader for his smug, self-righteous ego trip and Al Gore for not being himself and Bill Clinton for not keeping his fly zipped and his hands to himself, because there’s no goddamn way George W. Bush would even have been close enough to Gore for the Supreme Court to be able to select and install him if Clinton hadn’t tarnished the Democratic party in general, and there’s still another two years to go.
But The Quiet American distracted me
from
all that (at least, until I started thinking about how American
arrogance
toward the rest of the world was diminished not a whit by Vietnam,
despite
all the national angst about it… sorry, I have to stop that).
It’s
one of the year’s best movies, and I highly recommend it.
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