Ellington

"Go see "The Quiet American" before the next war starts, if there's time, even if you have to leave Jackson in your gas-guzzling SUV to go where it's showing."

The Quiet American" should open at last Friday, Feb. 7 in theaters across the country, following its limited November run in New York and LA to qualify for this year's film awards. Even now, Jackson may see no sign of this movie for weeks, if ever, because that's the way our metro-area theater chains can be about thought-provoking movies requiring more than a 10-second attention span and a third-grade education to appreciate.

Delayed release has long vexed this movie, and not just in Jackson. Distributor Miramax, beset with concerns in 9/11's aftermath about the movie's subject matter stemming from the events of 9/11, postponed the planned fall 2001 opening. Now, if fate has its way, the movie's release will instead occur on the verge of, or perhaps even simultaneous with, a U.S. military invasion of oil-rich Iraq, an action predicated on the stated goals of making the world safe for "freedom" and "democracy."

"The Quiet American" is based on the Graham Greene novel of the same name, published in 1955. Greene—a British writer whose fiction was grounded in the mid-20th-century world's significant political and religious conflicts—probably would have appreciated the many conundrums posed by the latest U.S.-Iraq crisis.

Curious minds might ask: What was so provocative about Greene's mid-1950s subject matter that scared Miramax out of a timely 2001 release? Does "The Quiet American" glorify actions of some revolutionary fanatic in a way that might discredit the War on Terrorism?

No. In the 1950s world of "The Quiet American," the United States was engaged in the long twilight struggle against the spread of World Communism, amid the ruins of European colonial empires. Remember that one? Back when there was no question about which of the world's countries possessed weapons of mass destruction and were willing to use them?

Perhaps what alarmed Miramax was that Greene's story line dares to examine U.S. mistakes in its international statecraft. For "The Quiet American" is about serious mistakes—some well-intended, some not—which led to far-reaching consequences, both subtle and violent.

"The Quiet American" draws its story from the earliest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Before the French abandoned their colonial territories there. Long before the Americans committed 500,000 troops, suffered nearly 60,000 military deaths, killed millions of Vietnamese, and still lost a war, not to mention squandered much credibility, both in the international community and at home.

This is the second film adaptation of "The Quiet American." The first, starring Michael Redgrave and World War II hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy, debuted in 1958, long before the Vietnam tragedy played out. In today's new film version, the venerable Michael Caine is cast as Fowler, a veteran British journalist in 1950s Saigon. Brendan Fraser plays Alden Pyle, the quiet American just arrived from the States, sent to set matters right.

Were Greene still writing, whom would he cast as his next novel's main characters? An American oil jobber sweating in the open desert among the wells? A Kuwait City shopkeeper scrutinizing the U.S. military buildup all around him? An renegade Iraqi cleric hiding deep in the Euphrates marshes? What would be the setting? And when would Greene set the climactic event:: the night the air assault begins, or the morning the first U.S. ground troops enter bombed-out Baghdad?

I don't think so. Greene persevered in analyzing the crises of his times, and their human consequences, often well before they gained popular attention. With prescience he chronicled clashes among religion, revolution, and conscience ("The Power and the Glory"); political kidnappings of Western ex-pats ("The Honorary Consul"); and even the discovery of ballistic missiles in Cuba ("Our Man in Havana").

I suspect that any book Greene would have published about a Persian Gulf conflict would have already come out years ago, back when it was less obvious that the world's attention would one day be centered there. I can picture him writing a book set in 1987 Baghdad. I can imagine his wry comments on how the Iraqis could fire a missile into the USS Stark, kill dozens of American sailors, and yet escape U. S. retaliation because the Iraqis were in mortal combat with America's then-arch-enemy, the fundamentalist theocracy of Iran.

So, a more fascinating question might be, what might Greene write today? As this year's Iraq crisis unfolds, Greene would more likely be off where the next clash is brewing. He would have found some remote place where naive representatives of the First World spread cultural and economic imperialism in the Third. A place where seeds of hatred and distrust and fear of change are taking root in yet another indigenous culture. Almost certainly a place even informed Americans don't think about much. Thus probably not even Pakistan or Indonesia or the Korean peninsula, but somewhere more remote and unlikely: the dusty horn of Africa, the clear-burned Amazonian jungles or the unforgiving mountains of Tibet.

Wherever that place might be, that's where I'd look for Greene to be taking notes, listening to the local population, flashing an amused smile as he records one more new irony, detects some emerging paradox, elucidates another sequence of unintended ramifications.

Go see "The Quiet American" before the next war starts, if there's time, even if you have to leave Jackson in your gas-guzzling SUV to go where it's showing. Afterward, as you leave the theater, start looking around for some simmering conflict, probably in some media backwater like Vietnam and Iraq once were, involving arrogant nations and entrenched institutions blind to the consequences of their actions. And hope some writer, with Graham Greene's eyes, ears and heart, works there in the middle of it all, getting a first draft down.

Mark Wiggs is an attorney and writer who lives in Belhaven.