Guilty innocence
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would do so much better to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost its bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." So Graham Greene writes in The Quiet American, a novel that plumbs the moral dangers of innocence. That quality is embodied in the character of Pyle, an idealist in early-1950s Indochina who turns out to be a CIA operative working to help a ruthless general gain power. The Boston aristocrat Pyle sees the world in black and white, and the charismatic General Thé, with his Yankee alliances, as a good guy. When Thé's men bomb a milk bar, Pyle walks among the bodies of the dead and wounded in a daze, unable to process what he sees.
In Phillip Noyce's beautiful film version, Pyle is played, in a brilliant casting stroke, by Brendan Fraser, with heavy-rimmed specs and a short haircut that give his big head a squarish look. Fraser demonstrated a comic canniness in last year's unjustly trashed Monkeybone, but here, as the bashful, charmingly awkward Pyle, he demonstrates the kind of acting control he hasn't shown before.
Pyle isn't the central figure, however, in either Greene's story or this screenplay. Michael Caine gives a magnificent performance as Fowler, the middle-aged London Times correspondent whose initial attitude toward Pyle--a combination of bemusement, irritation and protectiveness--turns to horror when he figures out how deep the American's political involvement goes.
