My best man and I had a celebration last night featuring dinner at the amazingly delicious House of Prime Ribs and Michael Caine’s Oscar-nominated Best Actor performance in The Quiet American. HPR is only about two blocks away from the much better known Ruth’s Crist Steak House on Van Ness in San Francisco but better known does not equate to better dinner in this case–the entrees, for instance, are about the same price but HPR includes salad, potato, and delicious creamed spinach sides with unlimited refills while RCSH is a la carte. Yummy!
The UA Galaxy is only a few blocks south of the restaurant and it wasn’t quite raining so we walked over. Let’s just say this theater, part of the huge Regal Entertainment chain, looks better on the outside, is in serious need of a refurbishing, and leave it at that. The movie is based on the classic 1955 novel by Graham Greene and tells the tale of very early American involvement in Vietnam, just before the French lost their nerve (LOL, history repeats itself over and over) after Diem Bien Phu and pulled out, leaving the anti-communist battle to the gung-ho CIA cold warriers.
Brendan Fraser co-stars with Caine as one of these Americans. Fraser seems to be shaping his career in much the same way as Caine has, or Anthony Hopkins for that matter, making interesting, smaller quality films like this (or Gods and Monsters) while taking the big paydays (the Mummy films, Dudley Do-Right). He plays his part straight, the quiet American of the title, yet a man who knows his path in life, who doesn’t care if his arrogance shows, and one has to give Fraser a well done for the job.
The story opens in Saigon in 1952, where Caine is Thomas Fowler, a reporter for The London Times with an unloved wife back home in Blighty and an entrancing native mistress, played by Do Thi Hai Yen, when Fraser’s Alden Pyle accidentally on purpose meets him at tea time. Yen also shows up and Pyle can no more resist her charms than Fowler; this triangle forms the dramatic core of the film, along with the boiling Vietnamese politics.
Yen and Caine have been together for two years, he loves her desperately but his Catholic wife won’t give him a divorce and her concerned older sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa) is making a quiet fuss about their relationship because she fears Caine, like so many other foriegners, will simply pack his bags and leave Yen behind at his convenience. Fraser, in front of Caine, admits his instant love, but Yen turns him away. Still, Fraser has a job to do while Caine avoids a home office recall and eventually their paths cross again.
Director Phillip Noyce has made a number of critically acclaimed films, including the recent Rabbit Proof Fence, and he gives The Quiet American the sort of smooth, languid pace one expects existed in Saigon and in collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle uses an interesting, unusual visual style that mixes rough handheld shots, extreme closeups of the actors reacting to each other’s dialog or lost in thought, and colors that never seem to be truly lit. The key problem is the script by Christopher Hampton, which never quite breaks through the surface with sufficient dramatic tension though one assumes that the novel had an advantage in it’s ability to present the inner thoughts of the characters which an unseen narrator (voiced by English Patient director Anthony Minghella) can’t match.
Mildly recommended
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