It’s been forty years since I read Graham Greene’s novel on which this movie is based, and I’ve completely forgotten the plot, so I can’t say how closely the film follows the original story. But, having seen the film, I will now have to look the book up again and find out.

Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) is a reporter for the Times of London, on the Saigon beat in 1952. He has settled into the waning days of the Franco-Vietnamese War quite comfortably; he has a small office, an extremely competent and well-informed assistant named Hinh (Tzi Ma), and a lovely mistress, Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), whom he deeply loves and who, he assumes, feels the same way about him. He makes no judgments, holds no opinions, just reports the facts, and does very little of that — by the spring of 1952 he has turned in three stories that year, and the Times is making noises about bringing him back to England, and to a wife for whom he apparently has little affection.

Enter Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser, in one of his best, though certainly also his pudgiest, role). Pyle is a young Bostonian attached to an American medical mission, in Vietnam to treat indigent natives for trachoma, an endemic though easily-cured eye disease. Pyle meets Fowler, meets Phuong, falls in love with Phuong, tries and eventually succeeds in taking her away from the Englishman. Such, it says on the IMDB, is the story: “A British opium addict, resentful of American colonialism in southeast Asia in the 1950s, vies against a young American for the affections of a Vietnamese beauty.”

It is, of course, very far from the story; the Fowler-Pyle-Phuong love triangle is just the backdrop to another triangle, one with the French at one vertex, the nationalist Viet Minh at another, and the third just becoming occupied by a “third force” under a self-proclaimed General The, the source of whose support is less than obvious, though, with the advantage of historical hindsight, we can easily figure it out, if we assume that “General The” is really named Ngo Dinh Diem (a minor gangster and river pirate who was puffed up into a dictator by the powerful Western nation that selected him as an anti-communist client in the middle 1950s).

The story is largely about Fowler’s attempts to remain uninvolved (as a good journalist should) and his final inability to do so after, first, his abandonment by Phuong in favor of Pyle and second, a mass bombing in central Saigon that is supposedly the work of communists but is actually an attempt by other forces to discredit the Viet Minh.

The main characters are all well done. Fowler is underplayed in typically British fashion, except for the scene in the American embassy, where he comes very close to running amok. Pyle’s apparent innocence is convincing, but somehow the later revelation of his real role comes as no great shock.

Interesting also are Phuong and her sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa). The sister, who despises the French and eventually goes to work at the American embassy, is pretty obviously out for the main chance. Phuong would also appear to be the same sort of person, but her affection for Fowler is evidently not artificial, and although one “experienced” reviewer (at IMDB) states that “she’s a perfect example of the desperately ambitious, beautiful mistress whose only long-term goal is to be taken to ‘The Land of the Big P.X.’”, it should be obvious from the finale that this is, for her, most definitely not the case.

The movie was apparently made a couple of years ago, and then shelved after 9/11; it is now in a very limited release to give it a chance at a couple of Academy Awards, which, IMHO, it deserves.