Michael Caine has made some real crap movies over his long career. Who hasn’t tried to forget his terrible performances in “Jaws: The Revenge” or Steven Seagal’s directing debut, “On Deadly Ground”? But for all of his poor choices, he has made some truly excellent pictures (“Hannah and Her Sisters,” “The Cider House Rules”), and has picked up two Best Supporting Actor Oscars along the way.
Now his uneven film career has reached its peak with “The Quiet American.” Caine has never been so good. In fact, there are few actors who have achieved the quality of performance that Caine gives in this beautiful adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel of the same name. While maintaining the cynical and tough exterior of his character, Caine masterfully shows his underlying fragility and vulnerability.
Caine truly deserves his Academy Award nomination, and should win the Oscar for Best Actor.
Caine plays Thomas Fowler, a London Times reporter assigned to Vietnam in the early 1950s, who is a passive and cynical observer of the French struggles with the early emergence of Communism in Southeast Asia. While stationed there he meets Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), an American who has arrived in Vietnam to aid in medical humanitarian efforts.
While cordial to each other, the tension between the two occurs when Pyle, who isn’t who he pretends to be, falls in love with Fowler’s lover, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen). But the love triangle isn’t the only friction facing the two men. Pyle emerges as a deceptive antagonist of the Vietnamese troubles, while Fowler, clouded by his love for Phuong, faces the decision between action and inaction after he discovers Pyle’s true intentions.
Like Caine, director Phillip Noyce has also made some really mediocre films (“Sliver,” “The Bone Collector”), but his efforts here negate any failures in his career. Noyce demonstrates a strong but gentle style in making this film. He doesn’t succumb to the temptation of exploiting the action sequences, but wisely focuses on the human aspects of the story. With help from screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, Noyce fully realizes the true attributes of Greene’s talent of using political conflict as metaphors for the conflicts of the human soul.
Noyce is perhaps best known for his work on two of the Tom Clancy adaptations (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”), but “The Quiet American” shows the faults of those films and the books they are based upon. Whereas the Clancy books use their dramatics as a means to propel the action and plot, Greene uses the plot as an excuse to investigate and understand the human condition. It is too bad that Greene is no longer alive, because it would be fascinating to see what he could do with the current political events facing our world.
Stephen Allan can be reached at [email protected]