Noyce: Double Integrity

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By David Ansen

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In 1978 Phillip Noyce made a wonderful movie called "Newsfront," about a 1950s Australian newsreel cameraman. Like the other talented Australian directors of the '70s--Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford--Noyce got scooped up by Hollywood, where he turned out action thrillers: "Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger," "The Bone Collector." He was good--when the scripts allowed him to be. But now, in a striking career turnaround, he's returned to his roots in two new pictures. Both the strong, outraged "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and the richly atmospheric "The Quiet American" show a filmmaker reclaiming his soul.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" confronts an infamous piece of Australian history: the government-sanctioned abduction of half and quarter-caste Aborigine children from their mothers by order of A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), chief protector of Aborigines. Neville believed he was doing the children and their culture a favor; in fact, it was genocide by assimilation. (The policy didn't end until 1971.) Noyce's heroine, Molly (Everlyn Sampi), is based on an actual 14-year-old, who with her sister and cousin was removed to a settlement to be trained as a servant. The movie is the story of their escape and their attempt to get home, a 1,500-mile journey along a rabbit-proof fence. Noyce uses his Hollywood craft to unfold this primal, powerful story, he has an epic feel for the harshly beautiful Australian landscape and he gets wonderfully natural performances from the three girls. His bold, lyrical images stay in your head, like an unaccountably beautiful nightmare.

Noyce's version of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American," adapted by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, is set in Saigon in 1952 in the midst of Vietnam's war of independence against the French. But it's as if Greene knew what future horrors lay in wait when he created the title character, Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), the American agent whose idealism wreaks havoc on those he wants to protect. Pyle's antithesis is cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine, in great form), a married man with a beautiful young mistress named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen). Phuong is less a character than a symbol of Vietnam itself, whom the American wants to "save," turning her into a mirror of his own benevolence. Noyce's rendering of the novel is far more faithful than Joseph Mankiewicz's 1958 version, which--to Greene's horror--made the American heroic. Noyce's version is haunted by the war yet to come, a war that would shatter (though only temporarily, it now seems) many of America's illusions about itself. Far from being a period piece, this love story/murder mystery/political thriller couldn't seem more timely.

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