An elegant story of corruptibility

Graham Greene’s spirit hovers over “The Quiet American,” the new version of his prescient 1955 novel, like a shrewd and dispassionate ghost. Star Michael Caine, who gives one of the great, inescapably moving performances in a career filled with them, based his character on personal impressions of the late author. And Greene’s lifelong concern with moral ambiguity gives this film a texture and complexity that movies don’t usually achieve.

No one today is writing books quite like Greene, the author of “The Third Man,” “The Comedians,” “Our Man in Havana” and two dozen more, novels known for their elegant writing and their deft, almost casual mixture of dramatically compelling plots and profound issues.

Set in Vietnam circa 1952, at a time when the French were the embattled colonial power we later became, “The Quiet American” is about the corruptibility, not the more typical transcendence, of the human spirit; about how easy it is to become tainted and complicit; about how even a cynic has innocence to lose, and even an innocent can do terrible harm.

Australian director Phillip Noyce, best known for major Hollywood action thrillers (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger”), has returned to the tone of his earlier, more human-scale works like “Heatwave” and “Newsfront.” “The Quiet American” is a graceful, contemplative film that gradually and artfully draws us into a world where the personal and the political get fatally intertwined.

Noyce and his cast -- Caine as skeptical British journalist Thomas Fowler, Brendan Fraser as the dangerously idealistic American of the title, and Do Thi Hai Yen as the stunning Vietnamese woman they both love -- are helped by a script that was touched by many hands but ended up elegantly written and very much in the Greene spirit.

Credited to Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, “The Quiet American” performs numerous nips and tucks to the novel’s plot, but none that seriously affect the thrust of the piece. It’s safe to say that Greene, who was said to be furious at the way the 1958 Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave version (written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz) distorted the book’s unhappiness with Americans, would be much more pleased with the current effort.

Though it is set in Vietnam before the U.S. got involved on an earthshaking scale, Greene’s novel is extremely discerning about what it is in the American character -- the messianic zeal, the sureness of being right -- that made what came later inevitable. Its message (characterized by the novel’s opening Byron quote about an “age of new inventions / For killing bodies, and for saving souls, / All propagated with the best intentions”) couldn’t be more relevant as we get ready to storm into yet another troubled country very far away.

Should this sound too serious, don’t forget that it was Greene’s gift, shared by the film, to clothe these concerns in compelling drama. It also helps to have the fluid Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer of choice for many Asian directors (most notably Wong Kar Wai for “In the Mood for Love”), behind the camera. Doyle is adept at capturing both the chaos of Saigon street life and the country’s parallel mystery and delicate beauty.

The man with the best intentions is a bright and idealistic 32-year-old American economic aid worker, Alden Pyle (Fraser). He’s described in the novel as someone “determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world,” with the narrator waspishly adding, “God save us always from the innocent and the good.”

That skeptical narrator is seen-it-all British journalist Fowler (Caine), an old Vietnam hand who prides himself on his dispassion. “I don’t get involved,” he tells Pyle, who cultivates the older man’s friendship to get to know the lay of the land. “I just report what I see.”

Fowler is not so old that he doesn’t have a beautiful Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, with whom Pyle falls in love literally at first sight. As Fowler’s graceful voice-over puts it, “Saving a country and saving a woman would be the same thing to him.”

Fowler is at a disadvantage in this contest because he has a wife in England who won’t divorce him, and Phuong has an unromantic, avaricious sister who sees Pyle as a prime catch. As the relationship drama plays out, the American gets increasingly involved with what he calls a “third force,” a putatively democratic alternative to both communism and colonialism headed by the mysterious Gen. The.

It is the nature of Greene’s plots that no one is as they seem and the world stands revealed as a more complex place than anyone anticipated. It’s not just, as the novel has Fowler say of Pyle, that “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” it’s that everyone’s motives and actions get called into question.

This is a story about the mutability of acting well and acting badly, about how easy it is to cross that line, a story that underlines the impossibility of staying neutral and the inevitability of taking sides.

Both Fraser, cast to type as the square-shouldered American with a felled-ox quality, and the quietly enigmatic Do, seen in Tran Anh Hung’s lovely “The Vertical Ray of the Sun,” do impeccable supporting work here, but finally this film succeeds as well as it does because of Caine.

A veteran of more than 100 TV dramas and some 80 theatrical films, Caine gives the kind of seemingly effortless performance it needs an entire career to prepare for. With a face that has known a thousand compromises, and a world of regret in his every gesture, Caine’s Fowler, open to tears, to rage, to disappointment as well as love, seems actually to have the character’s life. Caine’s performance is intricate without seeming to be, a nuanced marvel of the actor’s craft.

*

‘The Quiet American’

MPAA rating: R, for images of violence and some language.

Times guidelines: Adult subject matter, brief sexuality and violence.

Michael Caine ... Thomas Fowler

Brendan Fraser ... Alden Pyle

Do Thi Hai Yen ... Phuong

Rade Sherbedgia ... Inspector Vigot

A Mirage Enterprises/Saga Films/IMF production, released by Miramax Films. Director Phillip Noyce. Producers William Horberg, Staffan Arhrenberg. Executive producers Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella, Guy East, Nigel Sinclair, Moritz Borman, Chris Sievernich. Screenplay Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by Graham Greene. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Editor John Scott. Costumes Norma Moriceau. Music Craig Armstrong. Production design Roger Ford. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.