The Quiet American (15)

How Greene predicted Agent Orange

Normally you hate to give away the ending of a story, but with The Quiet American, most people are in on the secret anyway. Graham Greene's novel, set in 1952 and published in 1955, ends with the narrator Fowler pondering two uncertain futures, his own and Indo-China's. The coda of Phillip Noyce's adaptation follows the story down the path we now know: newsman Fowler, having filed the odd desultory report to the Times, finds himself at the heart of the action and goes on covering the major news stories from Vietnam right into the mid-Sixties. You're rather amazed that Fowler – played by Michael Caine as a war-weary, all but burnt-out case of a certain age – manages to hold out for another decade and a half, but it makes a sort of redemptive ending for Greene's hero, and a bitter one for the rest of the world.

It shows that adaptations and remakes sometimes get an extra fillip from being brought in line with hindsight. Greene could not have foretold what would happen when the French left Indo-China, yet The Quiet American reads like a prescient warning to America not to blunder into a lethal quagmire. Joseph L Mankiewicz adapted the novel in 1958 and gave the quiet American Pyle, played by Audie Murphy, an altogether more dashing status than Greene did. Phillip Noyce and his screenwriters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan are pretty faithful to the novel, give or take a few intelligent structural revisions, and use what we know about subsequent history to give the story an extra twist of bitterness.

Caine's Fowler is a blasé expat in Saigon, in love with Vietnam and with a young Vietnamese woman, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen). Then in walks Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a flat-topped, horn-rimmed American aid worker with fervent ideals. Pyle falls for Phuong too, and makes his earnestly chivalrous proposal to her while Fowler sits by and watches – a wonderful display of sour embarrassment from Caine.

A cherubic ideologue, Pyle enthuses about a "Third Force" to save Vietnam for democracy – neither French nor Communist, but independent (though a little sponsorship might be necessary). Such a force materialises in the form of one General Thé, who appears out of nowhere with a fully-fledged army behind him. Fowler attempts to interview Thé, but the meeting goes haywire when he asks the wrong questions. Thé fumes with rage and storms out: he suddenly remembered a pressing engagement, explains his interpreter. What spoils this tight, brittle scene is the sudden appearance of a grim-faced American intelligence man skulking – literally – behind a pillar.

We'd have got the point without this clumsy touch. Greene's great ironic insight was his ability to pinpoint that shady border where gung-ho idealism slipped into surreptitious dirty-tricks tactics. Way before official US intervention, America, and Pyle in particular, are already in up to their necks in Indo-China: the explosion that leaves blood on Pyle's natty brogues is only the start. The film underlines what Greene conveyed so subtly, and this is presumably why Miramax in the US became so nervous about releasing the film straight after 11 September: not because of what it says about past policy, but because the theme of America backing ill-advised horses abroad had again become uncomfortably pressing.

The story's difficult centre is Pyle's ambiguity. Gushing ingenuous gallantry, he says he wants to save Phuong, whom he sees as a living metaphor for Vietnam. Though he insists "We're not colonialists", he moves in on her as if he had an absolute right to stake camp, displacing Fowler with the quasi-military might of youth, charm and earnestness. And Phuong's part in this? Awkward. Greene presents her almost as a mysterious luxury item, elusive but available to be bought and sold. The film, which sees her largely through the two men's eyes, maintains this tone: the press kit actually describes her as "as beautiful, exotic and mysterious as the city of Saigon itself", and though you wince, this is pretty much all Noyce can do with her – except for one moment. Phuong makes a brief, muted jibe in Vietnamese at her sly, venal sister, which the two men can't possibly get but which we do, thanks to a subtitle: "Sometimes you're as vulgar as the French you hate so much." Just briefly, we get a glimpse of the private intelligence and cultural attitudes that otherwise are only hinted at, although actress Do Thi Hai Yen gives Phuong an alertness suggesting she registers far more than she ever reveals.

Inevitably, the film is caught up in all the usual contradictions between the Westerners' fascination with "the exotic" and the brutal realities that Noyce wants to bring home to us. His trump card is cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who knows the looks of Asia inside out – and the way that Asia often glamorises itself – having worked with Wong Kar-Wai, Chen Kaige and other masters. Doyle creates a dense, grainy atmosphere, beautifully playing the hot, opiated density of nightclub interiors against the bleached-out mundanity of a mid-morning city square. Most daring of all is Fowler and Pyle's tense night trapped on the road, a sequence steeped in barely penetrable blackness: it won't look so hot on video, but on the big screen it's a masterly case of painting with shadows.

Caine's bitter sobriety is more effective than it has been in ages; he may miss Fowler's languid reluctance to engage, but he rallies most compellingly as the story reaches its biting point. Brendan Fraser is adventurous casting as Pyle, given how cleverly he has managed in the last few years to capitalise on the cartoon-character aspects of his physique. At first, he seems a gentle, gauche goon, but then you see some wonderful fine-tuning, especially as his eyes flicker nervously round a trench under fire while he presses Fowler about Phuong. But the change of emphasis in the script makes Pyle more sinister than Fraser can convincingly manage – at once a callow selfish boy and a hard-nosed operative. The script didn't need to use Pyle's character to make its point so directly: its subtlest intimation of US intentions comes when Fowler walks into the American Legation and it's a whole different world, a self-enclosed encampment in sleek almondy wood, the décor alone telling you they intend to stay.

It's foolish to complain that any adaptations, even the best, lose the subtleties of a Greene text. Noyce's approach is, you might say, just subtle enough (and far subtler than Rabbit-Proof Fence, his bombastic treatment of a compelling story). It's hard to think of The Quiet American as a politically contentious film, or a truly Greenean moral twister: if it finally opts for being a thriller in a racy setting, it manages that pretty well. And given that Noyce only recently emerged from several years of Hollywood hard labour on mind-numbing productions like The Saint, this is something of a welcome redemption for him too.

j.romney@independent.co.uk