The Quiet American

Here's a problem with writing a review of a film many days after you've watched it. I get all muddled about the details. It may be, though, that it's just this particular film's winning combination of sparsity and complexity that are to blame. It's based on a Graham Greene novel, and few films do such a good job of showcasing literary quality. Even the voiceovers have literary merit. At first, I thought the story was like so many other stories -- two men fighting over a girl, with the added exotica of it being set in Vietnam as the French are battling the communists for control of the country. But it's filmed with the slow, stately pacing of a play, albeit one a lot less theatrical and melodramatic. Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser play the men in love with a Vietnamese woman (who is very beautiful, but has little else to do, sadly). Caine is a British reporter who needs a story in order to stay in Vietnam, and Fraser is an apparently dorky, yet kind, American who steals away the woman. The chilling denouement towards the end reveals who Fraser really is, and why he's in the country. I don't know whether I'm supposed to believe it, but even if it is untrue, it most certainly was prophetic.

year: 2002
length: 101 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258068/combined