Considering the way Miramax has been pussyfooting around putting The Quiet American in theaters, delaying its release since the fall of 2001, you might expect something incendiary, or at least vaguely confrontational. No such problem, and no such luck. Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Graham Greene's avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman.

Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who's living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. While Fowler's following his daily ritual of taking tea at the sumptuous Hotel Continental -- "I'm English; I have habits," he admits in voiceover -- he meets Pyle, a genial, white-suited American who introduces himself as part of an aid mission to combat eye disease among the Vietnamese. Since the movie opens with a shot of Pyle floating, face-down, in Saigon's otherwise-tranquil harbor, it's clear there's more to him than Fraser's callow countenance initially suggests.

Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle (whose snarling dog is a none-too-subtle symbol of the aggression at bay) when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun's Do Thi Hai Yen), who's been Fowler's girlfriend for the last two years. "If I were to lose her, it would be for me the beginning of death," Fowler tells Pyle, but Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what's best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. Simultaneously, the political situation begins to heat up as Fowler, threatened with recall to the paper's London office unless he ramps up production, takes a trip up north to meet the mysterious General Thé (Quang Hai), a militaristic anti-Communist who, Fowler finds, has been receiving both money and munitions from the CIA. What's more, he finds, Pyle is CIA himself, his feigned innocence no more real than it was with Fowler.

"I should have known that for someone like Pyle, saving the country and saving a woman would amount to the same thing," Fowler muses, but much the same is true of Noyce's film. Greene's love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We're stuck looking through Fowler's eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what's best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject. Would that the camera might wander off, Y Tu Mamá También-style, and give us a glimpse of life out of the reach of colonial eyes.

Caine's Fowler, though, is a significant creation, an affecting portrayal of a man who's forced by circumstances and advancing age to confront what kind of person he's allowed himself to become. A good quarter-century older than the Fowler described in the book, Caine plays Fowler as the Ghost of Empire Past, the image of fading British influence, unable to understand the rules of the new, American-style game, let alone play it. When he tells Pyle early on, "I offer no opinion, I take no action, I don't get involved," there's a swagger in his voice, but if inaction initially strikes him as a luxury, it begins to feel like a stain on his soul.

Even then, though, Fowler can't get it right. When he does act, it's only after events have been pushed to the breaking point, and he's still motivated more by jealousy than conscience. The actions he does take only make him seem more like Pyle. Rade Serbedzija's splendidly weary gendarme, charged with investigating Pyle's murder, looks as if he's ready to pack up and go home two years before Dien Bien Phu, and though the closing montage of newspaper clippings makes it clear that Fowler does remain, it's only as a witness, not an actor. (The role journalists can play in shaping the public's response to a conflict is more or less ignored; Greene's writer's guilt suffuses the whole story.)

If Fraser's Pyle is more sympathetic than the novel's one-note caricature -- albeit less of a hero than the version of him in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1958 Hollywood version, which inverted Greene's ending and cast WWII vet Audie Murphy in the Pyle role -- he's still a representative, an allegorical puppet. Which would be fine if Noyce and adapters Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan hadn't dulled the story's political wits, trading agitprop for pop psychology. Pyle, and Fowler, and Phuong, might each stand for something, but the movie doesn't.