Long before it opened nationwide in the United States, The Quiet American premiered in Vietnam to great fanfare. I saw it in Saigon last December, when the Vietnamese government literally rolled out the red carpet for director Phillip Noyce, actor Brendan Fraser, and the press.
The reason? As one of the Vietnamese representatives put it during a reception for Noyce and Fraser before the screening, “It shows Americans as bad people in the Vietnam War.”
Noyce winced at that comment and leaped up on stage to say, “Americans are not bad people. The movie is about an American with good intentions who made bad mistakes.”
It’s exactly this message that got the movie shelved in the United States for a year and a half. Made before 9/11, the film was nearly kept off the silver screen for good due to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In the movie, based on the 1955 novel by Graham Greene, British journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) warns young, naïve American CIA agent Alden Pyle (Fraser) not to get involved in the politics of Vietnam. Pyle ignores him, and his naiveté helps to trigger a bombing that kills dozens of innocent people on the streets of Saigon and subsequently leads to his own murder. Pyle, who claims his action was for the world’s “common good,” seems to embody America’s mistakes in Vietnam.
After 9/11, with an ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and increasing moves toward war with Iraq, Miramax reportedly was afraid of offending a patriotic audience and put the film on hold. And so an American movie was hushed in its own homeland, a country that otherwise boasts of free speech. I had to travel to a totalitarian country to see it.
In Vietnam, though government censorship is the rule, many Vietnamese are pushing the free speech envelope. Waves of political arrests in recent months have not deterred the will of those who want to push Vietnam toward true democracy. Some are making underground films that challenge totalitarianism.
But political activists who once looked to the United States as a model of free speech and open society are increasingly weary and disappointed with America today. In the post-9/11 United States, free speech is a constitutional right, but–from government officials to corporation executives to filmmakers–self-censorship seems to be the name of the game. When Colin Powell made his case against Iraq at the United Nations in New York recently, U.N. officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 anti-war mural Guernica. On February 12, a poetry reading scheduled at the White House was canceled for fear that anti-war poems–by such great American poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes–might be read.
America has traditionally been large and proud enough to contain its multitudinous contradictions. The American eagle holds an olive branch in the talons of one foot and arrows in the other. We have the CIA and the Peace Corps, B-52 bombs and Disneyland, Jerry Falwell and MTV.
The world has long had a love-hate relationship with America. The love part has a lot to do with the power of Hollywood, which is highly entertaining and often takes our government down a peg or two. Think X-files, Rambo, and Conspiracy Theory, to name just a few offerings. But increasingly people abroad believe the American eagle is clasping arrows in both claws, having dropped that olive branch somewhere along the way. The world’s only superpower is a sovereign with permanent economic and political interests, willing, as Donald Rumsfeld promised this week, to take on any foe alone. It needs no apology, nor does it want any cinematic or poetic criticism any longer. Many believe our new motto is: might makes right, baby.
That The Quiet American almost didn’t make it to U.S. theaters–and is now shown without a few scenes that referenced “American adventurism”–worries me. At a time when security trumps civil liberties, I think art should be loud and challenging, not meek and muted.
Besides Hollywood has always underestimated the sophistication of American audience. If anything, we hunger now more than ever for art that challenges the status quo. Pro-war or not, in a democracy we all need to lift that dark curtain off Guernica. The day we are so insecure that we can’t tolerate art that provokes and warns and asks questions is the day we begin to live under oppression.
The Quiet American (running time 1:58, rated R)
This article appears in May 8-14, 2003.
