White Noyce
In the hands of bland craftsman Philip Noyce, two powerful stories lose their dramatic charge
by Noel Murray
Rabbit-Proof Fence
dir.: Philip Noyce
PG, 94 min.
Now showing at Green Hills
The Quiet American
dir.: Philip Noyce
R, 118 min. Opening Friday at Green Hills
Australian director Philip Noyce has two movies in general distribution right now: Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American. Both are about the ramifications of a colonial mind-set, and how the good intentions of outsiders often wreck the lives of the people they intend to help. Unfortunately, Noyce, who’s known for slick but dim action pictures like The Bone Collector and Patriot Games, doesn’t have the eyes for pictures with such political depth. He lacks a point of view.
Of the two features, Rabbit-Proof Fence comes closer to having any kind of core-shattering impact, perhaps because it’s simpler. Based on a true story, the film follows three aboriginal girls (played by Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan) circa 1931 as they break loose from a government camp and attempt to find their way across the outback to their mother. The scenario gives Noyce an opportunity to depict the controversial “stolen generations” of mixed-race Australian natives, who from the 1900s until 1970 were secretly removed from their homes and trained to be domestic servants in the white world. Theoretically, they were meant to marry white people, so as to gradually breed out their ethnicity.
The story lets Noyce play to his strengths as an action-suspense storyteller. As the girls make their way home along the nearly country-long, farm-protecting “rabbit-proof fence,” government officers close in on them from the north, an aboriginal tracker moves in from the south, and semi-accurate newspaper stories alert the nation to be on the lookout. The girls don’t know who to trust, so they fall back on their natural inclination to trust no one, which isn’t always the best plan.
It’s a compelling narrative, and Noyce deftly negotiates his heroines’ narrow escapes, but the overall tone of Rabbit-Proof Fence is too flat. There are traces of sociological depth—in the way that the aborigines regard every direct address with a silent, suspicious stare, and in the way that Kenneth Branagh’s governmental guardian character truly believes that he has the people’s best interests at heart. But the movie’s plot never develops beyond “injustice overcome.” There’s no broader indictment of contemporary racial condescension, and Noyce doesn’t even manage to convey the universal feeling of being trapped by one’s very habitat. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a solid, well-crafted adventure film, but it lacks passion—or, more to the point, outrage.
Prior to Rabbit-Proof Fence, Noyce shot an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, with Michael Caine in the role of Thomas Fowler, a British correspondent in love with a local woman in pre-U.S.-intervention Vietnam. Brendan Fraser plays Alden Pyle, an American businessman who always turns up suspiciously where the action is; he may harbor feelings for the journalist’s girlfriend, Phuong, played by Do Hai Yen.
Greene codified a foreign policy critique into the bones of his story, and so it remains in Noyce’s film. The passive Brit and the aggressive American both express their ways of saving a country in the same ways they try to save one woman—Fowler by refusing to commit and hoping Phuong will come around to him anyway, and Pyle by maintaining a constant presence and subtly manipulating Phuong into believing that he’s the right man. The two men become cautious friends, even as they scheme against each other, and Caine and Fraser are both great at playing outwardly polite and inwardly devious. For a while, their byplay carries the film, with help from the voice-over narration taken straight from Greene.
But as with Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American never builds much momentum. Noyce films the story straight, putting espionage where there’s supposed to be espionage and explosions where there are supposed to be explosions. The material is inherently smart, but Noyce doesn’t add any sense of sweep or urgency. His direction is thoroughly unexceptional: There’s no moment at which the audience can marvel how briskly the two hours have passed, or wonder how the story led them down a path they never meant to take. The director scarcely betrays a point of view, and while that’s an admirable quality for some movies, would-be agitprop should have some blood flowing in its veins.
Some viewers will admire the low-key intelligence of both Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American, pointing to the crisp, visual storytelling and serious tone; they’ll say these are “action-adventure movies for grown-ups.” Some might even describe the mood of the two films as “pensive.” But that would imply Philip Noyce is thinking about something. If he is, he never shares.
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