Tag: Graham Greene

The Vietnam-9/11 connection?

“There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001.” Every time he thinks he’s going to wake up back in the jungle…In a fit of self-serving revisionism, Dubya attempts to reinvent the lessons of Vietnam before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, arguing that our problems really began because we withdrew from Southeast Asia too early. (Also, apparently we lost the war because of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

So, on the bright side, it looks like Dubya is progressing along his high-school reading list.) As you might expect, this line of argument is not sitting well with many historians, among them the venerable Robert Dallek: “What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,’ he continued. ‘We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.‘”

It’s Oh So Quiet.

Still catching up with my Oscar slate, and last night’s foray was Phillip Noyce’s remake of The Quiet American. All in all, very well done, and a battered, despairing Michael Caine deserves an Oscar for this much more than he ever did for his turn in the schlocky Cider House Rules. (As I said last week, though, the Best Actor field this year is very, very strong, and I still think Day-Lewis has the edge – having not yet seen any of the movies featuring Best Actress nominees, I can’t really comment on the women.) Brendan Fraser is also quite good, and the political dimension of the story (i.e. America’s involvement in sponsoring Vietnamese terrorism) is very well-integrated with the dramatic tale being told. If anything, the film slipped in the ratings to the right only because (a) The Pianist was better, or at least more powerful, (b) I found this film a bit slow in the first hour, partly because the tale begins at the end with the death of the “quiet” American (not much of a spoiler – it’s almost the first shot in the film), and thus much of the dramatic tension in the story has already been siphoned off, and (c) the “Vietnam is a woman” allegory is a bit heavy-handed – the audience can pick up on what’s going on without it being stated over and over again. But it’s worth seeing, and Michael Caine is magnificent.