 |
| Before
the deluge: Caine and Yen (right) in The Quiet American. |
Fatal
Innocence
By
Shawn Stone
The
Quiet American
Directed
by Phillip Noyce
This adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel about the earliest
days of United States intervention in Vietnam couldn’t be
more timely. With the current administration ready to project
power across the globe in the self-described service of “democracy,”
it’s worth looking back on a golden age of American hubris,
the mid-20th century. In what was then French Indochina, a
young turk from Boston arrives with an anticommunist “how-to”
manual and enough optimism and enthusiasm to power an entire
Harvard cheerleading squad. Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) wants
to cure a common eye disease among the native peoples, and,
in particular, save a young woman named Phuong (Do Thi Hai
Yen) from the clutches of aging, married, opium-smoking Brit
journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). The young American
can’t see what’s coming when he tangles with Fowler, who is
the personification of wily, desperate—and ultimately, fearlessly
moral—Old Europe.
The film takes place in 1950s Saigon, as the French are losing
their colonial war against Ho Chi Minh’s communist insurgents.
Fowler, the jaded journalist, takes no sides. He has a good
life—a job that isn’t very taxing, a wife and home far away
(“I like London,” he explains, “right where it is”), and that
beautiful young mistress. Pyle’s arrival threatens all of
this. He falls in love with Phuong at first sight, and offers
her the protection of marriage that Fowler can’t. Meanwhile,
Pyle also seems to be something more than just a social worker—after
he arrives, strange things begin to happen involving a new,
“independent” rebel army, which opposes both the French and
the communists.
Most of the attention the film has earned has been directed
at Caine’s performance—and rightly so. Unlike, say, The
Hours, in which you can appreciate the surface of Nicole
Kidman’s turn as Virginia Woolf without having to contemplate
what her character really stands for, Caine’s journalist is
the true moral center of the film. The dilemma he faces is
both personal and political. For while Pyle blithely conflates
saving the country with saving the girl, Fowler must separate
the two desires and decide the best way to satisfy both. The
pain of age and the burden of wisdom are evident in Caine’s
every movement; the offhand way in which he seals everyone’s
fate—with the opening of a book and a few lines of verse—is
poetic and profound.
Australian Phillip Noyce, who helmed a couple of big-budget
Hollywood adaptations of technology-obsessed Tom Clancy novels
in the ’90s, has successfully reinvented himself as a card-carrying
indie filmmaker. Following the equally low-budget and dramatically
devastating Rabbit-Proof Fence—which chronicled the
official, decades-long racist policies of the Australian government—The
Quiet American arrives as the second film in the director’s
one-two punch of cinematic anti-imperialism. Both films present
stark examples of wrongheaded attempts to refashion the world
according to small-minded, blatantly undemocratic ideologies.
The scary part, of course, is that the folks behind those
ideas in both films are convinced they represent all that
is right and good. As previously suggested, nothing could
be more timely.
Thug
Ugly
Cradle
2 the Grave
Directed
by Andrzej Bartkowiak
The soundtrack-intensive Cradle 2 the Grave opens to
the dirgey strains of “Go to Sleep,” a rap song by DMX and
Eminem. Hunky DMX is the co-star of this slick actioner, along
with martial artist Jet Li, yet nothing in the movie begins
to approach the disturbing power of its theme song. For the
empty-headed Cradle, director Andrzej Bartkowiak—whose
previous film, Romeo Must Die, broke Hong Kong phenom
Li into the U.S. market—is merely repeating his ultra-stylish,
ultra-violent formula of chop-socky gang-banging. As a promo
for the soundtrack, Cradle rocks, but as a martial-arts
flick, it’s as overloaded and insensible as a Cadillac SUV.
SUVs come to mind because one of the film’s elaborate death
matches pits a monster four-wheel vehicle against a sleek,
pricey sports car. Another set piece involves an illegal smackdown
in a club, during which Taiwanese investigator Su (Li) and
a mob of bare-knuckled opponents topple the ring’s fence and
trample dozens of onlookers. (This queasy reminder of the
recent nightclub tragedies only makes the film’s glorification
of thug glamour even more reprehensible.) Su is looking for
black diamonds stolen from his government, but that’s just
a contrivance to get Li’s character into the country and Li
into the movie. In a role that appears to have been grafted
on, the nearly silent Su doesn’t do anything other than lend
his wushu-style kickboxing to the jacked-up action, mostly
because the film’s showcase star, DMX, can’t do wushu.
DMX plays Tony, the mastermind behind a fabulously well-financed
thievery ring who steal the black diamonds from a vault using
a black-market rocket. Uzis, apparently, are yesterday’s news.
The pseudo-spiritualized crew members clasp hands and intone
“faith” before every heist, and they only rip off drug dealers,
although they’ll do business with the scum of the earth, including
a rather amusing Tom Arnold as a wussy black marketeer. Gabrielle
Union, whose spunky charm is comparable to Reese Witherspoon’s,
is relegated to providing T&A as Tony’s crewmember girlfriend.
Tony and Su team up after Tony’s young daughter is snatched
by a sadistic international arms dealer played by Mark Dacascos,
the Hawaiian kung fu world champion who proved sensationally
cinematic in last year’s martial-arts epic Brotherhood
of the Wolf. No such luck here: Dacascos’ scary agility
and Li’s amazing acrobatics are consistently short-circuited
in favor of gimmicky effects, one of which cribs from old
vampire movies. Not content with graphically breaking bones
and gouging out eyes, the director adds some digitalized internal
carnage as well. Bartkowiak, a prolific Hollywood cinematographer
for decades (from Speed to Nuts), knows his
stuff, and Cradle’s whiplash pace and big-budget props
are almost eye-catching enough to gloss over its offensive
concepts, including the script’s enlightened-rap tokenism.
The director also comes off as having a real passion for the
rap genre, but that’s probably as authentic as DMX’s airborne
double-reverse karate kick.
—Ann
Morrow
|
Columns
& Opinions
