Ray Pride

Love is a battleground.

In "The Quiet American," the release of which was delayed for over a year because of fears about the bruised sensibilities of U.S. audiences after September 11, everyone involved is working at the top of their form. Michael Caine considers it his best performance, and his quarrels with distributor Miramax Films are reportedly the only reason the film is getting its present modest release the week before Oscar nominations are announced.

Thomas Fowler (Caine), an anti-colonialist Brit, is a veteran Times of London correspondent who's grown indolent in Indochina in the early 1950s while the French are still battling the Vietminh army. A young mistress, a former taxi dancer named Phuong (Do Hai Yen) is only part of his world-weary stagnation. The arrival of a substantially younger American named Pyle (Brendan Fraser), avowedly a medical researcher, as well as criticism from his editors back in London, leads to romantic and professional conflict. Screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan have produced the sort of compelling and intelligent literary adaptation (which won't satisfy the purists among Graham Greene aficionados) that used to be Hollywood's mainstay, yet it is done with a maturity and grace possible only in contemporary movies. Director Philip Noyce, working with profligately talented cinematographer Christopher Doyle, create a dustily exotic Saigon neverland, and the work is never mere chinoiserie, nor as extravagant as Doyle's style in Hong Kong-made pictures like his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai ("Chungking Express," "In the Mood for Love"). Working with spare classicism, they find a visual grammar of spent grandeur to mesh with Greene's splendid, plaintive prose, never overpopulating the alleyways of rue in which the romantic triangle (and unfolding of America's first involvement in the Vietnam War) steep.

"I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam," Fowler's narration begins. "The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London." At first, it's a scary thing: voiceover in a Miramax picture is often a sign of last-minute fiddling. Yet throughout, Caine's voice, intermittently lovely, direct lines that draw from or approximate Greene's prose, adds a gratifying extra layer to the narrative, as opposed to something like the Ed Wood, Jr. style voice-over affixed to the corpse of "Gangs of New York."

And Caine is very, very good. You want to keep your eyes on him, to admire acting as habitation, as breath. Caine demonstrates a marvelous, complex stoicism while playing a man who's sorrowful, ragged, a burned-out case. Fraser's physicalized performance as a man who moves by manners and good intentions is both solid and amusing; a turn of a hand, a shift of his stance, is often all that he requires to illustrate the shifts in Pyle's many agendas. In Greene's words, Pyle "gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown-up words." This boyish rectitude offers a pleasurable contrast to Caine's Fowler, a man doing the right thing for improper, even corrupt reasons; asking questions, becoming a genuinely virtuous and daring reporter to sustain his lifestyle, his love.

Phuong is a dangerous character for any story, the unfolding flower who symbolizes the fragrant and exotic motherland. Noyce stirs this lightly. His assurance, as in his early Australian pictures like "Newsfront," as opposed to American misfires like "Sliver" and "The Saint," is evident throughout. Mirage Enterprises, headed by Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and William Horberg is the sort of script-and-performance-intent production company that encourages this kind of craft.

Doyle has a great eye, particularly for Saigon's blue and blur past dusk, used to similar brooding effect in his later work for Noyce in "Rabbit-Proof Fence." There's also a milky haze of midmorning light that suggests the disabling parch and sear of tropical daylight.

Greene's ambiguities are troubling enough to frighten a film's financiers, partly for its skeptical look at the earnestness of early U.S. advisors to the war; a scene showing the terrible aftermath of a terrorist detonation is cold and blunt, with blood measured by the heartbeat. "Sooner or later, Mr. Fowler," Fowler's closest Vietnamese source insists, "one has to take sides if one is remain human." Co-writer Christopher Hampton made an attempt at deciphering the roots of terrorism in his acrid Robin Wiliams-starring adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," but "The Quiet American" is much more precise. (Note the shot after the attack in the square, where Pyle gently dabs blood from his cuffed trousers with his white hankie.)

The battle between the older man and younger man for a young woman and the nineteenth century representatives of empire with the twentieth century's is blunt but never reductive. It's worthy of Greene's line he wrote for Fowler (not in the movie), which goes, "Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young, we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older."

"The Quiet American" opens Friday.

(2003-02-05)

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