Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) was a “quiet American”, says Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) to a French policeman. “A friend,” he adds, as the lifeless corpse of Pyle stares back at him with a wretched expression.
This is the scene that opens Phillip Noyce’s Vietnam-set political drama before the film flashes back a few months earlier to 1952 Saigon, where Fowler, an ageing Englishman, lives leisurely as a journalist reporting on the first Indochina war. When Pyle, a young American aid worker advocating for US intervention, falls for Fowler’s 20-year-old Vietnamese lover, Phượng (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến), the jaded reporter’s tranquil existence begins to unravel.
At Pyle and Fowler’s first meeting at the Continental hotel, it is clear that Pyle is anything but “quiet”: handsomely bespectacled, the American idealist is attentively reading Dangers to Democracy, a book on foreign policy. “We’ve got to contain communism,” Pyle says with conviction. Although Fowler brushes off Pyle’s ideologies with cynical pragmatism, he scarcely leaves a dent on the American’s unwavering belief that Vietnam should not be ruled by communists or colonial powers, but by a US-backed “third force”.
Pyle is committed to his neocolonial rhetoric; Fowler, meanwhile, is morally fatigued. But the two form an unlikely friendship, complicated by their rivalry to win Phượng’s heart.
“There’s beauty. There’s daughter of a professor. Taxi dancer. Mistress of an older European man,” is how Pyle describes Phượng, adding: “That pretty well describes the whole country, doesn’t it?” Indeed, Phượng’s country is beautiful, even if it has been ravaged under French rule. “We are here to save Vietnam from all that,” Pyle proclaims with zeal.
Played with politeness and Fraser’s boyish charm, Pyle effortlessly disarms the audience. At the same time, Fraser lends Pyle’s aspirations such sincerity that he seems less an agent of American interventionism than one of its victims, manipulated by the very cause he champions.
Caine also delivers a career-best performance, finely distilling the collapse of Fowler’s world-weary cynicism under the weight of guilt. Even Caine’s gait is slow and deliberate, moving through Saigon like a spectre, almost dissolving into the opium vapours he puffs if not for his frequent sardonic remarks. Yet behind his dry wit is a man terrified of losing power: “I wish I could give you everything,” he tells Phượng, trembling with shame. Through Caine’s intricate tapestry of vulnerability and remorse, Fowler’s reckoning gains a haunting resonance as he rediscovers a sense of justice beneath his corroded morals.
The true heart of The Quiet American, though, is Phượng, played with almost silent brilliance by Đỗ Thị Hải Yến. Caught between the western men and their conflicting views of Vietnam, Phượng becomes emblematic of her country’s fate. Just as Vietnam was fought over by foreign powers, Phượng is objectified as a prize to be won by Fowler and Pyle. But Đỗ humanises her with measured, melancholic glances and wordless contemplation. “It [means] ‘phoenix’,” Phượng explains her name’s meaning with pride, perhaps prophesying Vietnam’s rise from the ashes to claim its hard-fought independence. Through Phượng’s poise and decorum, Noyce personifies Vietnam’s enduring dignity through colonialism and imperialism. Her presence permeates every frame of the film, moving elegantly with the elegiac flow of Christopher Doyle’s cinematography.
As tragedy strikes in front of the Saigon opera house, Doyle’s camera adopts Fowler’s point of view and frantically runs across a brutal massacre. Mirroring the handheld realism of cinéma vérité to photograph the innocent deaths in the film’s climax, Noyce and Doyle seemingly allude to the decades of documented American atrocities in Vietnam.
Depicting events immediately preceding the Vietnam war, The Quiet American was released on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, making its criticism of American interventionism all the more pertinent. Now, 50 years after Vietnam, the US finds itself backing Israel’s war on Gaza. Clearly, The Quiet American’s admonitions have fallen on deaf ears.
The Quiet American is streaming on SBS on Demand in Australia, Prime Video in the UK and Fubo in the US. It is also available to rent in the UK and US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
