Review of The Quiet American (2002) by Francis V — 21 Jan 2005

[SIZE=3][I]The Quiet American[/I] has a lot in common with Carol Reed's 1949 masterpiece [I]The Third Man[/I]: the two films are based on novels by Graham Greene, they both involve a love triangle, and they focus on a man in a foreign land who becomes more cynical as he learns harsh lessons.

Unfortunately, [I]The Quiet American[/I] is different from [I]The Third Man[/I] in one crucial way: it's not nearly as good. The movie is narrated by a British reporter named Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), a man who is chronicling the political turmoil in Vietnam circa 1952, and having an affair with a much younger Vietnamese woman named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen).

Fowler tells us how he met and befriended an American named Pyle (Brendan Fraser), whose mission in Vietnam remained a mystery even to Fowler. When Fowler takes Pyle out for a night on the town, Pyle is enchanted by Phuong and immediately falls in love with her, which understandably creates some tension between the two men.

While this love story is ostensibly the center of [I]The Quiet American[/I], it never really develops dramatically, largely because the woman who comes between the two men, Phuong, is an underwritten character played without any emotion by Do Thi Hai Yen.

[I]The Quiet American[/I] is slightly more successful as a political thriller, but even the scenes focusing on the battle for power in Vietnam are somewhat muddled and are not as powerful as they should be.

The entire film feels underdeveloped and hurried, as if the filmmakers weren't quite sure what the central story of the movie actually is. I have little doubt that Greene's novel fleshed out the characters more and provided more of a political context to the setting, but sadly those elements are missing from this adaptation.

There are still some elements left for us to admire: Caine's performance is low-key and effective, and Fraser is perfectly cast as Pyle, since the actor's own stiffness perfectly matches the character's moral rigidity.

Director Phillip Noyce has succeeded in giving [I]The Quiet American[/I] an elegant look, but once again Noyce proves to be a stylistically dull filmmaker with a limited imagination (his only noticeable trademark is the rather annoying repetition of shots in which actors look directly into the camera).

It is the film's overall lack of invention that prevented me from ever really connecting with [I]The Quiet American[/I]. The movie ends with a montage showing the development of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, and it is a testament to the film's shortcomings that we are left wondering what that montage has to do with anything that preceded it.

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