The quite American

Noel Vera

Graham Greene nowadays never seems to dominate our attention, yet
never seems to totally leave it, either. After a recent major
production of his "The End of the Affair" (and through the '80s, a
string of TV adaptations of his other works) we have "The Quiet
American" (2002)--the second after Joseph Mankiewicz's 1958 film.
Greene was appalled at that picture, the way it flipped his novel's
meaning around so that the eponymous American was an innocent and
the English journalist the villain; Philip Noyce's version is more
faithful to Greene (though at least one person--Jean Luc Godard, no
less (and no less ironically)--claimed the not-as-anti-American
stance of the film was actually an improvement).

The plot at first glance seems simple enough (though nothing ever
stays simple with Greene): Fowler (Michael Caine, essaying the role
first played by Michael Redgrave) has been in Vietnam for years, has
a mistress named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen, previously seen in Tran Anh
Hung's "Vertical Rays of the Sun"), and has no intention of going
back to England. He meets Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a worker in
an American economic aid mission (he specializes in the prevention
and treatment of trachoma), who promptly falls in love with Phuong,
and tries to take her away from Fowler.

It's as allegorical a love triangle as any you might find: the
beautiful Phuong, meant to represent aspects of virgin, whore, and
Vietnam, is contested by the vulgar, naïve American with a bright
future ahead of him (brighter, it turns out, than anyone suspected)
and the jaded, amoral European, who can only promise stagnation and
decay (he can't marry Phuong because his wife, a Catholic, refuses
to divorce him). It's an old conflict, staged in a Southeast Asian
setting--youth vs. age, idealism vs. amorality, America vs. the Old
World (Nabokov would restate this in more sexual terms with
his "Lolita"). The concept is Greene's and the film's characters,
faithful to Greene, suffer accordingly--everyone except Fowler is
pretty much a caricature. You especially note the lack of texture in
Phuong: as the object of desire of both men, Ms. Do relies more on
her slim, boyish figure and pretty face than on anything she
actually says or does onscreen. Phuong has her moments--like when
Fowler demands she turn Pyle out and she hesitates, unable to bring
herself to hurt Fowler; later we see suggestions of defiance, of her
perhaps loving Pyle or at least felling morally disgusted with
Fowler, but the suggestions seem to come more from plot necessity
than from any inner self. Solemn placidity does not necessarily
evoke fascinating mystery--as, say, Greta Garbo, or Jeanne Moreau,
or even Maggie Cheung might tell you.

Fraser fares a little better; he's note-perfect as the stumblebum
buffoon. When we learn more about him, the innocence seems to desert
him; later, when all is revealed, the innocence is restored--
restored, and running frighteningly hand-in-hand in Pyle's mind with
his hidden abilities and power. In some scenes there's a masklike
opacity to his face that's a little chilling; you see the same
opacity in Chinese youths during the Cultural Revolution, and in the
Hitlerjungen in World War 2. Part of the power of the novel, and the
film does manage to convey some of this to the big screen, is in the
way Greene seems to evoke the deadly serious yet somehow cartoonish
manner Americans handle their foreign policy--an appalling yet
fascinating mixture of pratfall idealism, willful ignorance, and
absolute power.

Pyle's foolishness and idealism are satisfying, it's his passion
that's not: when Pyle sits down with Fowler and explains how he fell
in love with Phuong, he might as well be trying to explain the
pathology of trachoma--Pyle's love sounds every bit as contrived as
his cover story sounds convincing (of course his love might be meant
to be seen as contrived…but that only begs the question: why does
Pyle trouble himself with a broken-down old journalist and his taxi-
dancer lover?).

What brings the film to life, more than Greene's rather obvious
symbols and doomy prose (spoken in voiceover narration to get that
proper "literary" feel), more than all the cardboard characters
stacked one atop the other, what puts a recognizably human face to
all this, is Michael Caine's performance as Fowler. It's a major
role, perhaps the best he's had in years, and it's every bit as
controlled and detailed in its quiet moments (his tired exasperation
at the letters from his paper begging him to come back to England)
as in its showier ones (a scene where Caine limps with a cane into
Pyle's office and raises hell). His irritation with and reluctant
affection for Pyle helps humanize the American for us, and delivers
the final sting of the eventual tragedy. Caine treats Fowler's
moments of conscience the way Greene would, as bodily aches every
bit as insistently painful as his ankle, which is twisted at one
point (both injuries demand his undivided attention). Caine shows us
the heart of what Greene wants us to see: of a soul weary in its
comfort, being poked and prodded back into uncomfortable moral
awareness.

Australian director Philip Noyce steps away from his commercially
successful thrillers ("Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger")
and less successful ones ("The Saint") to actually do something
interesting again (like "Newsfront," his early film about newsreel
cameramen). With Chris Doyle (the cinematographer of choice when
you're a Hollywood production in Southeast Asia) and Christopher
Hampton ("Dangerous Liaisons"), he crafts a velvety, half-lit world
of hidden menaces and ambiguous meanings, punctuated by sudden
bursts of violence. He captures many of Greene's nuances (the way,
for example, sympathy keeps shifting from Fowler to Pyle and back
again), and manages to stage--successfully, I think--some of
Greene's lovely little bits of dramatic business (the fateful book,
to be opened before the fateful window).

What Noyce doesn't seem to have that perhaps the finest film
adaptation of Greene had would be Greene himself. "Quiet" bears many
resemblances to Greene's 1949 thriller "The Third Man:" American
waif wanders into darkly complex world, watched by weary European
eyes, and falls in love with enigmatically beautiful native. "Third"
is lighter in tone than "Quiet"--Greene regards it as one of his
lesser "entertainments"--yet benefits greatly from his own hand
shaping and developing the material (the novel, in effect, was
written with the screenplay ultimately in mind). "Third" has a much
tighter script, meant to unfold in under two hours instead of over
several hundred pages, yet the relationships develop far more
persuasively (Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) falls in love with his
native, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), in a subtler, more tentative
manner--no bald declarations of love here). There are perhaps no
dominating performances in it like Caine's Fowler, but there is an
entire film's worth of memorable ones, from Cotten's hapless Martin
to Orson Welles' indelible Harry Lime, to even the balloon salesman
who makes a last-minute appearance at Lime's capture.

It helps that director Carol Reed took the trouble to procure Anton
Karas' uniquely jaunty zither music, and that he has Cotten speak
his voiceover narration in an equally jaunty manner--to act as
corrective and ironic counterpoint to Greene's dark sensibility. It
helps that Reed with the help of master cinematographer Robert
Krasker created one of the most distinctive worlds in all of cinema,
the skewed, shadowed world of postwar Vienna, and that Welles
improvised Lime's unforgettable little speech about brotherly love
and the cuckoo clock. "Quiet" is a skillfully made film (made even
more relevant by troubling parallels with America's present
involvement in Iraq), but with perhaps too much reverence for the
source material; "Third," in which Greene argued for a happier
ending, saying an "entertainment" doesn't deserve so much cynicism
(ironically, the novel of "Quiet" has Fowler ultimately getting his
divorce)--"Third" has withstood the test of time, and stands today
as a classic of world cinema.

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)