Dir. Phillip Noyce, 2002, US/Germany/Australia, 101 mins, some subtitles
Cast:
Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Do Thi Hai Yen, Rade Serbedzja, Tzi Ma, Robert Stanton
Director Phillip Noyce continues his thread of pulsating political thrillers (Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games), with this faithful interpretation of Graham Greene's book The Quiet American.
The scene is 1950s Saigon, a city fighting for independence from French colonialists, where detached journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) meets charmingly gauche medic Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser). So unfolds not just a love-story, but also a cruel friendship, dogged by betrayal that becomes a metaphor for the pillage of Vietnam. Deceiving a man who saved his life, Fowler is finally depicted as a pathetic cripple alongside the smooth-talking stranger who has taken everything from him.
Noyce's Vietnam is half-lit and bleak much of the time, the persistent rain and mud swirling around the brothels and alleyways of a city on its knees. In amongst the filth, Fowler and Pyle's fight over their mutual love Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen) is as bitter as the rape and destruction around them.
Just as Fowler remains detached, "I take no action, I don't get involved, I just report what I see", so Noyce uses little commentary to convey the film's most brutal moments, he simply uses the men's friendship to define it for him.
A bomb has exploded in the city centre, and Fowler, filmed silently and in slow motion, runs through the mass of dismembered and dying bodies. As he crouches to help an old man, he sees Pyle dressed in shirt and tie, striding toward the carnage. Pyle stops, not to help the wounded, but to take a white handkerchief from his pocket and wipe away blood from his trouser leg. It is the film's magnum opus and the point at which Fowler understands the full extent of Pyle's betrayal. Despite the brutality around them, Pyle's simple action is chilling, and says more about his character and his country's involvement in the war than any words could possibly convey.
Pyle's demise is split with scenes of Fowler half-listening to the drunk Granger telling him that his son has polio and faces death. As Granger gets more distressed and Caine more distracted so scenes of Pyle moving nearer to his death, chased like a rat through a maze of dead-end alleyways, is slammed at the audience. That the quintessentially English Fowler could stoop as low as to be responsible for the death of his friend signifies how the stench of war has engulfed him.
In the end we leave Fowler and Phuong back where they started, dancing in a bar as the band plays on, with Vietnam smouldering around them. Despite Pyle's death, Fowler's is an empty victory. His Catholic wife won't divorce him and he can't take Phuong back to London. Pyle's murder won't stop the killing either, it is bigger than all of them. As Fowler observes, when he realises he is losing Phuong to Pyle, "When did everything change? Maybe there isn't one moment ." Just as their doomed friendship changed nothing, so the war rages on. Noyce reflects this in the final scenes with a succession of newspaper headlines announcing French occupation, American intervention and finally American invasion, resulting in the Vietnam War by 1966 where the killing fields will be recycled.
Rebecca Kemp
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