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Reviewer: Pete Luisi-Mills
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater I saw this film the same day we invaded Iraq, and it was hard not to draw parallels between the movie and current events. Certainly "Vietnam 1952" and "Iraq 2003" differ in many ways, most notably in the American approach (covert and invisible in the former, hammer-like in the latter). In the cold-war 1950's, cloak-and-dagger spy tactics, campaigns of misinformation and dissembling politicians were the order of the day. Today, for better or worse, we seem to be more comfortable with the naked use of force to achieve our ends, and anyone who doesn't like it can jump in the Seine. The parallels are not in the method but in the substance. America has always believed it knows best who should rule where, and we do not hesitate to act when a foreign government threatens (or seems to threaten) our interests. We have had a varying rate of success, of course, and Vietnam represents the biggest black eye this country has ever received. While most Americans are familiar with our military involvement in the 1960's, not everyone realizes that the war in Vietnam began much earlier: armed conflict between the French, the communists, and other separatist groups began soon after the end of World War II; full-fledged war began between North and South Vietnam in 1954 at the end of French colonial rule. The Quiet American takes place in Vietnam in 1952, as things were really beginning to turn ugly. The French had lost control of much of the North, rogue armies were wandering the countryside, and terrorist bombings were beginning to erupt in the capital. In the midst of growing chaos, we are introduced to two non-Vietnamese men. One is an older British journalist named Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), correspondent for the London Times. He is a cynic who has been slowly dulled by age and opium — when he is recalled by his paper, he is confused until he realizes he has only submitted three stories in the previous year. His only joy is in his somewhat languorous relationship with a lovely young Vietnamese girl named Phuong (Do Hai Yen). The other man is a young, chipper American named Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), an idealistic, naïve American aid worker. They strike up an unlikely friendship, which is soon threatened by Pyle's growing desire for Phuong. Attempting to give his newspaper a reason to keep him in Vietnam, Fowler travels north into the heart of the fighting. Traveling to a remote village, he is horrified to find dozens of massacred men, women and children. When he asks who could have committed such an atrocity, he is met with denial on all sides; the French and the communists vehemently deny involvement while blaming each other. Fowler begins to suspect a third possibility: the megalomaniacal General Thé, a former officer in the French colonial army who has gathered his own army together and is running a two-front war against the French and the communists. Thé is being aided by a shady cadre of American operatives, among whom Pyle may or may not be an active member. As Fowler becomes more and more involved in investigating Thé, Pyle begins showing up wherever Fowler is, often under the pretense of discussing Phuong. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Pyle is more involved with the American operatives than he has let on. When Thé's terrorists begin bombing civilian targets, Fowler and Pyle find themselves on different sides of an increasing ideological gap. The Quiet American tells its parallel stories powerfully, and I found myself absorbed by the movie's tense romantic triangle as well as the broader political narrative. The two leads are both excellent: Caine imbues his character with a weary cynicism that slowly gives way to long-forgotten stirrings of human compassion, and Fraser is spot-on as a coldly efficient CIA operative hiding behind a mask of goofy congeniality. Though Fowler and Pyle are obsessed with Phuong (indeed, Fowler insists he would not be able to live without her) and impassioned in their fight for her affections, Phuong herself is curiously detached. It's not that she doesn't care for them; she makes it clear at certain points that she loves both them, though not necessarily in the same way. But there is a resignation to her demeanor that suggests there are deeper concerns in her heart than which man to be with. There is something petty and condescending in the way Fowler and Pyle struggle over Phuong without ever really including her in the process. For all their supposed love for her, they are unconsciously projecting their needs and desire onto her, too vain and idealistic to realize it. The movie is fairly obvious in its equation of Phuong with Vietnam and the two men with competing Western interests; woman and nation alike either need to be "rescued" or paternalistically kept and treasured. Disgusted by Pyle's blithely unctuous attitude, Fowler acidly muses, "I should have realized that saving a nation and saving a girl would be the same thing to a man like Pyle". Fowler is so besotted he doesn't realize he's guilty of the same confusion. The Quiet American is a film that asks the audience to consider: in time of war and political uncertainty, what is the larger moral concern? The ultimate outcome of a war between competing ideologies? Or the specific individuals dying in the street in front of your face? The movie is too smart to provide an easy answer to this question, but it is not neutral in regard to its characters. As we watch Pyle wiping the blood from his pant leg while dozens of people around him bleed to death, we realize that he has lost all sense of the reality around him. Regardless of the goodness of his intentions or the rightness of his convictions, by inuring himself to human suffering he has damned himself in the eyes of Fowler and the audience. In the end, it never occurs to Pyle that perhaps Vietnam might freely choose a government antithetical to American ideals, or that Phuong may not see herself in need of rescuing. Fowler, for his part, takes matters into his own hands, though the movie rightfully remains ambiguous about his motivations. The Quiet American was originally supposed to have been released in 2001, but it was shelved after 9/11, presumably because the public was not ready for a film that implicated the United States in its own acts of terrorism. Pyle, who at first seems so naïve and virtuous, becomes chilling when he justifies the deaths of women and children at the hands of terrorists: "In the end, I'm going to save lives," he says with absolute conviction. One wonders how often those words have been sincerely uttered by officials of American administrations covertly meddling in the affairs of Chile, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, and Panama. The Quiet American is a film that knows the world is complex, painted in a hundred shades of grey; that motivation for war is often a mélange of interests, and that idealism is not always a virtue.
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