What's missing in this picture? `The Quiet American'

Commonweal, Feb 28, 2003 by Barry Hillenbrand

In March 1974, after nearly two years of covering the war in Vietnam, I boarded an Air Vietnam flight to Bangkok on route to a new assignment in Rio de Janeiro. Goodbye Tu Do Street, Hello Ipanema. I pulled a paperback out of my shoulder bag and began turning the slightly tattered pages of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, a book I had first read fifteen years earlier. How would Greene's 1955 novel of love, war, and treachery in the waning days of French rule in Indochina scan now that I knew something about Vietnam? The book was already something of a cult classic among journalists and old Vietnam hands. And with good reason.

As the rereading proved, Greene got much about Vietnam--and the Westerners who came there to meddle--just right. Of course, he wrote about it with great flair: the gold sheen on the rice fields in the late afternoon sun, the street chatter of the market women, and the confusing melee that passed for politics. Although it was written just as the defeated French were abandoning the country and the guileless Americans were moving in, the book has a foreboding of the disaster that would befall Vietnam during the subsequent years of what the Vietnamese today call the American war.

Now Greene's The Quiet American is back in a flashy, but sensitive, film adaptation directed by Australian Phillip Noyce. The movie stars Michael Caine as Fowler, a jaded British journalist who, like so many correspondents over the years, finds himself completely captivated by Saigon. "My home," admits Fowler, "had shifted its ground eight thousand miles." A middle-aged refugee from a withered marriage and a stale career back in London, Fowler luxuriates in the relatively light workload, the pipes of relaxing opium, and Phuong, his mistress, elegantly played by Do Thi Hai Yen. Fowler's world is disrupted by Pyle, a CIA operative played by Brendan Fraser, who arrives in Saigon "to save Vietnam." Fowler scorns Pyle for his American naivete yet is oddly fond of him. The two discuss what Western males in Saigon usually do: politics and women. They often disagree. Pyle ends up luring Phuong away from Fowler. It is Fowler's inner turmoil at the loss of Phuong and the possible end of his Saigon idyll that drives the story. Losing Phuong, he says, "is the beginning of death." It is Pyle's connivance with shady Vietnamese political factions that provides the drama and action.

Caine, director Noyce, and screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan get many of the textures of Vietnam right. There's much of Greene's prose in the film's voiceover narratives, delivered by Caine with touching empathy. Indeed, Caine's world-weariness is perfect and is, as Greene intended, the all-revealing foil to Pyle's youthful American foolishness. True, Caine at sixty-eight, is not the middle-aged man Greene envisioned for Fowler. Caine even slips into his working-class London Bermondsey accent occasionally, not exactly what is expected of the men from the Times who were nearly always upper middle-class gentlemen with accents to match. Nonetheless, this is undoubtedly one of the actor's great parts.

The film was shot in Vietnam. The settings are lush and lovely--and, for those of us who spent time there, familiar and evocative. Still, there are some curiosities, like the fireplace in Pyle's much too preciously decorated apartment. Houses in Hanoi may have fireplaces, but not in Saigon. Where are the water stains on the walls and the grime in the street? Saigon was never quite so tidy, even before the advent of the swarms of motorcycles and larger populations that now plague Vietnamese cities.

Yet I almost didn't get to see any of the Noyce/Greene version of Vietnam because Miramax, the studio distributing The Quiet American, initially shelved the picture. The completed film had its first screening on September 10, 2001, and was scheduled for a Christmas release. After the 9/11 attacks, Miramax panicked and, as it now admits, decided "to err on the side of sensitivity," pulling the film because it feared the content might prove offensive. After all, there are Fowler's scathing diatribes against Pyle and U.S. policy. Indeed, in the 1950s, reviewers attacked Greene's book as the anti-American ranting of a British writer with dicey, even dangerous, leftist associations.

And to make the film more susceptible to criticism, the Americans are on the wrong side of what we now call the war on terrorism. Pyle orchestrates a murderous incident, hoping to blame the attack on the Communists and generate support in the U.S. Congress for Vietnamese "third force" nationalists who will fight against both the French and the Communists. But innocents, including women and children, are killed. It was a lamebrained scheme that Pyle lamely defends by telling Fowler: "In war you use the tools you have."

So the film remained in the can until Caine, who smelled Oscar nomination, appealed directly to Miramax's Harvey Weinstein. Miramax relented. The film was shown to rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2002, and then released in Britain, New York, and Los Angeles in order to qualify for a 2002 Oscar. With no backlash developing, The Quiet American is now in general release, and Caine has his Oscar nomination.