Quiet desperation
The passions of love and war simmer below the surface in The Quiet American
The Quiet American harkens back to films of another age, when all passions and obsessions were indicated with loaded words and meaningful gestures, or were entirely unspoken, waiting below the surface like a dormant cancer.
Director Phillip Noyce and screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan faithfully translate novelist Graham Greene’s signature low-key prose to film. And Michael Caine, as Thomas Fowler, is a Greene protagonist tailor made for that aloof ambience. A British reporter for the London Times based in 1950s Saigon, Thomas takes comfort in the journalistic neutrality of his job. Despite an escalating battle for control of Vietnam between the French, the Vietnamese Communists and the Americans, Thomas’ moral code is defined by a stoic refusal to get involved.
“Even an opinion is a form of action,” he tells the newly arrived American Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who soon becomes Thomas’ solitary confidante in Vietnam. Despite such high journalistic principles, Thomas is eventually moved to action by what often moves so many others: the sight of the random, vicious deaths of innocent civilians in a political turf war.
Thomas also begins to suspect that despite Pyle’s hapless schoolboy ways, he may be involved in a more nefarious enterprise in Vietnam beyond the charitable aid mission he professes.
In The Quiet American, Caine returns to the frosty, morally ambiguous characters he played in Get Carter and Alfie. His voice rarely rises above a whisper, but Thomas carries more authority and power than any man’s shout. With his heavily lidded eyes that seem to zero in with predatory agility on human weakness, Caine is a bone-deep misanthrope encased in the shell of a gentleman. After a second meeting with Pyle, Fowler visibly chafes at the American’s presumptuously familiar greeting of “Hello, Tom.”
“Thomas,” Fowler curtly responds, in an instant, signaling the great divide that separates England from its cowboy offspring.
But beneath that archetypal British reserve and understatement, Thomas is a man of passions which can be fatally jostled like nitroglycerin, especially when it comes to Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), his lithe, beautiful Vietnamese mistress who he longs to hold on to as much as the country slipping from his grasp.
“If I were to lose her, it would be the beginning of death,” Thomas tells Pyle. That confession of romantic weakness, however, seems not to move Pyle, who continues his effort to seduce Phuong away from Thomas.
Thomas’ cynical remove from the political mire around him recalls classic film heroes defined by their refusal to get involved, from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca to Tom Neal in Detour. That detachment carries over even into Thomas’ sex life, where he seems to lack the energy to even assume the missionary position, as Phuong straddles his waist and enchants him with ethereal, sexual charms stronger than any political allegiance. Despite their allegiances or obstinate lack of allegiance, the men in The Quiet American are amazingly passive and lovelorn, consumed by one glance from the nearly mute, cipher Phuong.
The Quiet American is an accurate if not entirely soul-quaking adaptation of Greene’s style to film. It establishes such a believable atmosphere of quiet, old-fashioned gentility that when a moment of violence occurs, the carnage is even more devastating. Noyce’s morality-laden, hangdog film — which is draped in the kind of opaque, ambiguous situations that contemporary rhetoric paints in black and white terms — is a distinct departure from today’s movies, marked by extremes of stylish violence and an inflexible political atmosphere. The stern, sober reluctance to muck around in world events and the rash, proud certainty that one’s actions are always justified seen in Thomas and Pyle’s very different world views continues today, giving the film an added relevance.
The most frustrating element of the story is also an accurate carryover from Greene’s book. The love object that overwhelms two grown men with weak-kneed delirium, who inspires more violence and passion than the war itself, is as much an enigmatic vapor as in Greene’s book. Childlike, nearly mute, Phuong is more symbol than real woman — a passive, neutered version of the femme fatales of noir. This child-woman is instead a femme blank, easily lured away from one man by another. Despite Greene’s anti-colonialism and obvious disgust with America’s brutal, disastrous meddling in Vietnam, his heroine is a colonial fantasy of woman as some transitional territory easily passed from occupier to occupier, from British lover to American one. Country and woman are one in the same in this sober document of cataclysmic changes under way in Vietnam reflected in the uneasy war for a woman.