The Quiet American

Caine, but not able

The new adaptation of the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American begins with a corpse floating on the edge of a river, a fate that might have had an ironic chime in real life. Delayed in the wake of September 11 and bumped off the schedules by a nervous studio in the meantime, the film itself looked dead in the water. A year on it has been resurrected and now looks even more topical, for it tells how American confidence can fatally misjudge the foreign world and blunder into war. Go tell it to the Marines.

Phillip Noyce's film might be seen as redress for the 1958 adaptation of the novel by Joseph L Mankiewicz, which fudged the original ending and naturally infuriated Greene. Scripted by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, this new version not only cleaves to the line of the book, it actually sharpens the edge of its anti-American sentiment. Set in Saigon in 1952, it sets New World idealism on a collision course with Old World cynicism. Michael Caine stars as Thomas Fowler, a Times foreign correspondent (as Graham Greene once was) stewing in opium and indolence, filing the bare minimum to the London office and determined not to take sides as Vietnam slips into chaos.

At first he is charmed by the overtures of friendship from Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a quiet American who's attached to the economic aid mission; waveringly tall and bespectacled, Pyle seems a personable young fellow with earnest views on the need to "help", and Fowler is happy to show him the lay of the land. The shadow that eventually falls between them is that of a young Vietnamese woman, Phuong (Do Hai Yen), Fowler's long-standing mistress whom he would marry but for the intransigence of his estranged wife back in London – she's Catholic, and refuses to divorce. Pyle, who is smitten by Phuong and is egged on by her mercenary sister, himself offers marriage to the girl, at which point matters become complicated.

Complicated, but not altogether convincing. Much depends on the casting of the two leads, which the film gets only half-right. In the novel Pyle is described as someone "determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world", an innocence that hangs on Brendan Fraser as comfortably as his dapper white suit; his performance feels oddly abbreviated, as if vital parts of it have gone missing, but what time he does spend on screen isn't wasted. As for Caine, you may already have heard the distant drums of "Oscar nomination" for his role, and reports go that it was his bargaining power that finally persuaded Miramax to get behind the film and ensure its release.

If so, good for him, but I don't see anything award-winning about his Thomas Fowler. For one thing, he is contending with the memory of Michael Redgrave's superlative performance in Mankiewicz's film, his cold-fish detachment finally collapsing to reveal a pathetic desperation. Even on his own terms, Caine seems extraordinarily limited in his emotional range; the scene in which he learns that Phuong has flown the coop ought to be devastating, yet the performance simply can't accommodate the sudden flood of anguish.

The one brilliant scene in the 1958 film comes when Pyle asks Fowler to act as translator while he tries to woo his own mistress from him: Redgrave's feline wit made the encounter at once hilarious and weirdly urbane ("While you're thinking of what to say, do you mind if I put in a word for myself?") and in the dialogue one could hear Greene mocking not only American naivety but his own English self-depreciation. The scene is right there in the novel, and I looked forward to what Noyce would do with it. My mistake: amazingly, he decides to play it almost straight, and the delicious absurdity of the three-way dialogue is drained off. Here is the perfect illustration of how the two protagonists operate on entirely different wavelengths – and the film fluffs it.

Rather more intriguing is the film's decisive withdrawal of sympathy for Pyle. Greene's novel simultaneously investigated the terrible harm an innocent can cause, and the way in which the personal and the political become fatally entangled. Fowler eventually comes to realise that Pyle's mission is more sinister than he lets on, and that a "third force" is at large to put the squeeze on both French colonialists and Vietnamese communists. When a bomb explodes in downtown Saigon its aftermath explicitly unmasks Pyle not as the righteous idealist but a cold-blooded schemer whose innocence is a put-on. While this might make Pyle a more realistic character than the book does, it also hijacks the struggles of conscience Fowler is supposed to be enduring. Does he become involved to foil American intervention or is it simply to win back his girl? Pyle's duplicity no longer makes that question difficult to answer. The film in any case caps the point by rolling a montage of newspaper headlines that chronicle the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. (Greene, not for the first time, was prescient.)

This smudging of nuance is matched to the film's rather flat texture. The great cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In The Mood for Love) lights the interior scenes wonderfully; the exterior shots, on the other hand, have a curiously staged feel – even the sweat looks as if it's been applied. Seediness, the native atmosphere of Greeneland, is notable for its absence; so too is the more elusive element of sadness, burnt into the last line of the novel as Fowler contemplates his empty triumph: "How I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry."

Instead the film makes a flailing effort to encapsulate the mood with a poster tagline: "In war, the most powerful weapon is seduction." Gosh, and there was I thinking it was the nuclear bomb.