THE QUIET AMERICAN (Phillip Noyce, 2002)

Reviewed: November 27th, 2002

Quiet, alright. Real quiet. How quiet? Imagine a man (to make this analogy more accessible, let's say the man happens to be Michael Caine, star of The Quiet American) tiptoeing slowly across a mile long, carefully lit hallway. Occasionally he'll get scared by his own shadow (translation: occasionally The Quiet American jumps alive with an exciting set piece), but mostly he's stealthy and unobtrusive (translation: The Quiet American is a plodding, visually interesting but all-in-all-not-particularly-inspired retelling of Graham Greene's novel). Caine's performance is as about as great as everyone's saying it is, and my allergic rash to Brendan Fraser seems to finally have dissipated (couldn't even tolerate him in Gods and Monsters; why anyone would ever willingly cast Fraser -- with his goofy looks and utterly unremarkable chops -- in a drama, I'll still never know) but there's big problems here, the most gaping of which is that the movie is founded on a fundamentally unbelievable love triangle: both Caine and Fraser are in love with the same, can-hardly-speak-English, couldn't-be-any-more-boring, Vietnamese woman. I was actually willing to cut the movie some slack and buy Caine's coupling with the Vietnamese chick (if only because Caine's understatement is so damn accurate), but the way Fraser falls in love with her at-first-sight reeks of narrative contrivance. I haven't read Greene's novel but I'm willing to bet he sells this triangle hook, line, sinker with his melodic prose. On screen it just doesn't work, partly because Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games, The Saint) is so thoroughly a journeyman, partly because Fraser isn't a talented actor but mostly because it would theoretically require a lot of internal monologue (from Fraser's character) which the filmmakers seemed to have realized they couldn't get away with since the little internal monologue that is in the film (courtesy of Caine's character) plays flaccid, not an organic addition to the film so much as a book-on-tape sloppily mixed into the movie's soundtrack verbatim. The murder angle of The Quiet American also falls somewhat flat and the political discourse comes across as perfunctory and musty, but I must hand it to Noyce and cinematographer Chris Doyle: they expertly sustain an overriding aura of light doom, casting an eventually enticing (if you have patience) spell that lulls you into its vortex. This is a film of occasional strong elements with the misfortune to be cased in an egg-thin shell.

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