Movie Details
Aussie director Noyce takes on misguided Western meddling
Glenn Lovell
Mercury News
Published: Wednesday, December 25, 2002
Phillip Noyce, the Aussie director whose distinctive voice was all but drowned
out by such high-tech assignments as ``Patriot Games'' and ``Clear and Present Danger,''
comes roaring back this winter with not one but two highly personal dramas about something
near but not so dear: the nefarious encroachment of Western culture on other lands.
``Rabbit-Proof Fence,'' starring an amazing 14-year-old aboriginal actress named Everlyn Sampi,
opens today, and the director's even better ``The Quiet American,'' with a career-capping
performance by Michael Caine, arrives early next year after exclusive Oscar-eligibility runs in Los Angeles and New York.
Taken alone, each film proves engrossing and thought-provoking; in tandem, they suggest that Noyce, at 52,
may be one of the most underrated filmmakers around.
``Rabbit-Proof Fence,'' set in the arid West Australian outback in 1931, is both classic survival
tale in the Disney tradition and outrageous expose of a little-known government policy to separate ``half-caste'' children from
their aborigine mothers. The so-called Aborigine Act, we learn through a smarmy government official (Kenneth Branagh),
is meant to stanch the mixing of races until ``the aboriginal has been simply `bled out.' '' All similarities to Hitler's ethnic
cleansing on the other side of the globe are, of course, intentional.
Were ``Rabbit-Proof Fence'' -- named for the 1,500 miles of wire that once divided the continent -- only
about colonial discrimination, it could have been told as straight documentary, through newsreels and archival photos.
Noyce makes it much more by focusing on three young victims of the policy: sisters Molly and Daisy (Sampi and Tianna Sansbury)
and their 8-year-old cousin Gracie (Laura Monaghan).
Snatched from their screaming mothers and relocated to a ``proper school'' 1,200 miles away, the girls, spurred on by
the single-minded Molly, decide to escape with a bucket of water and make the trek home. Their nine-week journey through
rain, sandstorms and desert is the stuff of legend and, indeed, is the basis for a non-fiction account that inspired this rigorously unsentimental adventure.
Noyce has worked wonders with the material, stressing how arduous the trek was without losing sight of either the Simon
Legree-type overseers or the ``orphans'' in the fast-brewing political storm.
``The Quiet American,'' the second adaptation of the Graham Greene novel from 1955, couldn't be more timely. It is set in Saigon in
1952, on the eve of the French defeat at Diem Bien Phu and the installation of a Vietnamese puppet regime, or ``third force,'' to
secretly help the United States in its global mission of containment.
A never more dashing or fit-looking Caine pours body and soul into the role of Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper reporter who casts
a jaundiced eye at all things colonial. The title character is a Yank named Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who pretends to be
a rube abroad but who is in fact a shrewd CIA operative laying the groundwork for a pro-U.S. general (Quang Hai) by discrediting
both the French and Vietminh forces.
Noyce's movie, like the novel, opens with Pyle's murder. From there we flash back to the characters' first meeting and Fowler's
nagging suspicions that Pyle means to steal his mistress, a significantly younger Vietnamese dance hostess named Phuong
(Do Thi Hai Yen). This triangle was used by Greene as a metaphor for the battle for Indochina. Fowler is content to admire the prize
without owning her, while Pyle, the impassioned American, must possess her completely. As for Phuong, she just wants to be
courted and protected -- and therein lies imminent tragedy.
``The Quiet American'' is as sophisticated and haunting a conspiracy drama as ``Rabbit-Proof Fence'' is rough-hewn and
inspiring. Shooting on location in Vietnam, Noyce has captured both the country's spectacular beauty and its sweltering opium
dens and dance halls. Because Greene's story now can be seen as a prelude to an even more costly battle for Vietnam's soul,
this movie -- and Caine's brilliantly restrained performance -- have a sad, resigned tone to them.
Add ``The Quiet American'' to your must-see list. Though finished last September and immediately shelved by a nervous Miramax for
its critical take on U.S. aggression abroad, it deserves to be seen, debated and savored. As far as I'm concerned, Caine can
begin practicing his Oscar acceptance speech today.
|