The Quiet American. 2002. Germany/USA/UK/France. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton, Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene. With Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, Đỗ Thị Hải Yến. 35mm print courtesy of the DGA Motion Picture Industry Conservation Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. 101 min.
Michael Caine is rightly proud of his brilliant, Oscar-nominated performance as the cynical foreign correspondent Thomas Fowler, who witnesses with queasy foreboding the United States’ doomed intervention in Vietnam. Where Joseph L. Mankiewicz had reduced Graham Greene’s novel to an anti-Communist diatribe in red-baiting 1958, Noyce in his superior 2002 version is truer to Greene’s bitter analysis, both as an author and an intelligence agent, of that dangerous quality of meddlesome, messianic righteousness seemingly peculiar to the American character and its foreign policy. And while the 2002 adaptation fared poorly at the box office—its release having been stalled for a year following the tragedy of 9/11—Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times nonetheless spoke for many critics in offering lavish praise: “Star Michael Caine, who gives one of the great, inescapably moving performances in a career filled with them, based his character on personal impressions of the late author. And Greene’s lifelong concern with moral ambiguity gives this film a texture and complexity that movies don’t usually achieve…. With a face that has known a thousand compromises, and a world of regret in his every gesture, Caine’s Fowler, open to tears, to rage, to disappointment as well as love, seems actually to have the character’s life. Caine’s performance is intricate without seeming to be, a nuanced marvel of the actor’s craft.”