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THE QUIET AMERICAN
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By now we have all seen the Normative Asian Movie (NAM):
For maximum anticipatory doom, stage the quasi-obligatory Morgue Flashback: jowly London Times reporter Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) peering down at stabbed moon-faced Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), identifies the body and calls him friend. Then all we have to do is fade our voice out like this and cue the organist …
As the story opens, Caine is at the end state of this evolution, settled with Phuong, too old to care and mildly bemused at the arrival of white-suited Pyle, a young Boston doctor out to save Indochinese eyesight (and loosely modeled on the much more interesting and real Edward Lansdale, OSS, CIA, DOD). The French are fighting and gauchely losing a colonial rearguard action against an indigenous uprising that mingles agrarian revolt and home-brewed Communism.
In his 47 years on the silver screen, archetypal trouper Caine has played anything and everything (GOLDMEMBER, BLAME IT ON RIO, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, DEATHTRAP, SLEUTH, ALFIE, THE IPCRESS FILE), and it shows, both in his un-made-up old man's face (he's seventy now!) and in his restraint. "I am a reporter, I take no actions," he tells Pyle. "Ah," says Pyle, "but even to have an opinion is to take an action." Ironically, the person best suited to have played Pyle would have been Caine's younger self – Alfie and Harry Palmer would have thought Thomas Fowler impossibly decayed and weak – but Brendan Fraser (GODS AND MONSTERS, GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE, ENCINO MAN), an actor with considerable talent, plays Pyle with admirable subtlety, effortlessly chameleoning from jejune doughboy to geopolitical cynic with no more than a stiffened posture and a quickening of speech.
Fowler, of course, is the author surrogate of Graham Greene, who through such novels as The Third Man, The Power and the Glory, and The Comedians explored the fatal triangle of British reserve, hot-world corrupt politics, and Catholic guilt. His stock in trade was the shade of grey tinged with eighty-proof irony. He was the sort who, upon hearing "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," would doubtless have rued that he had not written it instead of its being uttered obliviously by a callow stolid Army lieutenant.
Greene despised cliché – his novels may have protagonists, never a hero – but the movie succumbs to it. The symbolism of people to nations is not just exact but countersunk. "Look at her," Pyle said to Fowler, "Beautiful, formerly a ticket dancer, now kept by an aging Englishman and ruined for marriage. Isn't that the story of this whole country?" Duh, geeze, I never thought of that. A key scene that should have been shot in real time is shown twice, first in super-slow-mo so we can see Caine' horror-stricken face, and then in narrated retrospective with a significant new data element revealed. Aside from defusing immediacy, it shows lack of confidence in the audience. And a final montage of spinning newspaper headlines reminds us that Vietnam Was A Quagmire (for those of you who read about it in high school history).
The original 1958 Quite American, starring Michael Redgrave and (improbably) Audie Murphy paved the road of CAM's. This QUIET AMERICAN takes that for granted, and adds co-executive-produced Anthony Minghella's (THE ENGLISH PATIENT) particular tropes: warm yellow-orange-brown tones, tight close-ups, and stories where any political action is justifiable if it protects a personal relationship. This same choice was made, with much greater effect, in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, still the genre's best.
Lush, engaging, simplistic and familiar, THE QUIET AMERICAN breaks no new ground. But old plow horse Caine and young stud Fraser sustain our interest … at least until the lights come up.
P S There is one total howler: Pyle shows Phuong a postcard of Faneuil
Hall and pronounces it Feh-nwoy, as in faux-French like Jean Anouilh,
whereas every Bostonian knows it's fannel like flannel …and
no Bostonian would ever pronounce it wrong.