Word: pyles
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...error occurred while processing this directive]Movies can't save lives. But they can dramatize moral and political dilemmas. Noyce believes that, in the enigmatic figure of Pyle, "Greene pinpointed something in the post-World War II American personality: an obsession to do good. The Vietnam War was prosecuted by people who believed that the end justified the means and that they were fighting a holy...
...Phillip Noyce's version of the 1955 Graham Greene novel The Quiet American deals with that time in the '50s when French colonialists were stumbling out of Vietnam and U.S. "advisers" were tiptoeing in. Despite the mounting carnage, Americans held fast to what they considered their ideals. As Alden Pyle, Greene's title character, says of one fatal explosion on a Saigon street: "What happened in the Square today makes me sick. But in the long run I'm gonna save lives...
...three people at the story's center?Pyle (Brendan Fraser), the older English reporter Thomas Fowler (Caine) and local lovely Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), whom the two men covet, conquer and betray?can be seen as representing the Americans, Europeans and Vietnamese of the early '50s, dancing on a slippery geopolitical slope that leads straight into the Big Muddy. They are also familiar figures in the Greene canon. The Quiet American is very nearly Greene's remake of The Third Man, his 1949 tale of political and sexual intrigue set in postwar Vienna, with the same cast of characters...
...watchful, wary Fowler is closer to Greene, for whom cynicism was just a dirty word for realism. He is beguiled by Pyle because of the American's very blandness; a man so open must be hiding something. Even Pyle's declaration of love for Phuong has to be the cover story for a more nefarious agenda. When the movie had a special showing last month at the Toronto Film Festival, Caine called the film "a cautionary tale. And the caution is: Don't try to take a 20-year-old girl away from a 68-year...
...Fowler and Pyle are two prickly points on the oldest triangle. Each man truly loves Phuong; it is the one selfless emotion they share. In Greene's world, love revs the heart rate and clouds the vision. So does political idealism. Both feelings can compel sporting chaps to commit indecent acts?like stealing a friend's woman, or conniving in a man's murder?with the justification that the worst thing to do was somehow the only right thing. "Sooner or later," a canny Vietnamese tells Fowler, "one has to take sides if one is to remain human." It sounds...