Rebecca Miller, the writer-director of “Personal Velocity,” is the daughter of Arthur Miller, and perhaps it’s merely this connection to an icon which explains the highly positive reaction the film has elicited in some quarters. Or maybe it’s the politically correct feminist theme that the tripartite picture, based on several tales from Miller’s short story collection, conveys. But it’s actually an unwieldy attempt to transfer three of them onto celluloid; with a ream of stilted narration obviously lifted from the tome, “Personal Velocity” comes across like an audio book to which photos have been rather unnecessarily added. While there are flashes of power here, the film never manages to escape its literary roots and become truly cinematic.

The first segment of the anthology centers on Delia (Kyra Sedgwick), a submissive lower-class wife who finally leaves her abusive husband (David Warshofsky) with her children after an especially traumatic altercation. The episode portrays some of the aspects of her unhappy life in flashback while detailing how she gets a waitress job with the aid of an old school acquaintance and deals with a randy young customer (Leo Fitzpatrick). Segue to New York City, where Greta (Parker Posey), a junior editor at a publishing firm, is picked by a wildly successful novelist (Joel de la Fuente) to work with him on his new book. Once again flashbacks are used to indicate her difficult past as the daughter of a powerful attorney (Ron Liebman) who left her mother; now her unexpected success leads her to wonder whether she’ll decide to abandon her sweet but ineffectual spouse (Tim Guinee), a magazine fact-checker still working on his doctoral dissertation. Finally, we’re introduced to Paula (Fairuza Balk), a punkish girl afraid to tell her boyfriend (Seth Gilliam) that she’s pregnant. She takes off on a drive to visit her father and picks up Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci), a bedraggled young man, along the highway; she finds that he’s been abused and, overcome by maternal feeling, wants to take him in. As it turns out, however, he has other ideas. There’s a last-ditch effort to tie the three tales loosely together, but it seems halfhearted; essentially they remain quite separate.

Obviously the various stories are intended to meditate on what it means to be a wife and mother, and how a woman can maintain her individuality within the context of those roles. But its fragmentary, disjointed structure, Miller’s propensity to use lots of visual tricks (including periodic groups of still photographs), and the archly knowing narration all make it seem awfully affected and allusive. It’s redeemed somewhat by the quality of acting. Sedgwick gives an honest, direct performance that doesn’t grovel for sympathy, Posey nicely depicts Greta’s increasing urbanity and self-confidence, and Balk does a reasonably good job of portraying the somewhat sullen, sensitive Paula. The picture is essentially a three-women show, with nobody else having much to do, but Leibman and Wallace Shawn (as Greta’s publisher) milk their short scenes for all they’re worth, and Pucci is quietly intriguing as the abused Kevin. (Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, should have been advised to tone things down.) On the technical side, the picture is typical of digital video product–which is to say it’s sometimes a trial for the eyes.

It may be that “Personal Velocity” will carry greater punch for female viewers than for a male one. But from this corner, though it’s only 85 minutes long, it doesn’t move fast enough.

Graham Greene, easily one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, is said to have despised Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of his 1955 book dealing with early American involvement in Indochina, which centers on the realization of British journalist Thomas Fowler that Alden Pyle, a young American embassy attache, is actually an intelligence operative creating a supposedly nationalist “third force” to supplant the French in the battle against the communist insurgency. One can certainly understand Greene’s attitude. Out of concern for the sensibilities of the domestic moviegoing public, Mankiewicz muted the original’s indictment of US government policy (a criticism which he intended to apply to a far broader geographical area than Southeast Asia) in favor of an anti-communist message; he modified the status of the title character and made his motives more simplistically noble. (It also didn’t help that Pylr was played, rather weakly, by Audie Murphy.) But while one can sympathize with the author’s objections to the changes, it must be said that Mankiewicz’s picture had many virtues, too–most notably a good deal of crisp, knowing dialogue, beautifully delivered in particular by Michael Redgrave as Fowler, the cynical journalist who narrates the tale, and stylish black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker (some exteriors were shot in Saigon, but most of the picture was filmed in Europe).

Now Phillip Noyce has returned to the book with a new version of “The Quiet American,” and it’s even better. Given the proximity of his native country to Vietnam, it’s entirely appropriate that an Australian should be drawn to the material, and he treats it with a fidelity of which Greene would surely have approved. There are excisions, to be sure (Fowler’s conversations with French pilots, for instance, and his amusing digression on Caodaism) as well as some additions for cinematic impact (e.g., Fowler’s close call at a dangerous warehouse, or his brief interview with the renegade General The) but while some of the changes are regrettable, reducing the sharpness of the argument and adding an unfortunate tinge of melodrama, as a whole the film is remarkably faithful to the author’s artistic vision and his prophetic geopolitical perspective. (In fact, its release was withheld after the 9/11 tragedy because it was feared that American audiences would be angered by its critical attitude toward their government’s frequently interventionist policies abroad.) The fact that it was shot in Vietnam–the locale brilliantly captured in Christopher Doyle’s sultry yet oddly crisp cinematography–and features many local actors also gives it a considerable advantage. Most importantly, however, the picture successfully evokes that Greeneland in which moral ambiguity dominates and there is no white-and-black, only varying shades of gray–a reality encapsulated in Fowler’s ultimate decision to betray Pyle to the communists, though it’s equivocal whether he does so out of a genuine detestation of the violence the man’s machinations are visiting upon the locals or simply out of rage at Pyle’s success in taking the journalist’s long-time Vietnamese lover Phuong (Do Thin Hai Yen) away from him–probably even he doesn’t know.

The virtues of Noyce’s film, however, aren’t restricted to its close adherence to the novel. This new adaptation of “The Quiet American” is a sensitive, cultivated treatment of Greene’s work as well as a remarkably faithful one. As with his other current picture, “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” Noyce has thrown off the shackles of his two-decade involvement with big-budget Hollywood product and returned to the simplicity of earlier years. This is an elegant piece of work; indeed, if there’s a flaw it’s that at times it seems a trifle too genteel. (One can also quibble with the decision to close things with a montage of newspaper clippings outlining the future course of American involvement in Vietnam–it’s too facile a wrapup.) Michael Caine certainly delivers one of his best performances in years as Fowler, though despite the fact that he’s appeared in lots of junk, one shouldn’t exaggerate their rarity (think of “Little Voice” and “Last Orders,” for example). He gives us a very different Fowler from Redgrave–decidedly less the suave, effetely cynical sophisticate and more the middle-class scribbler–but it’s just as effective. One respect in which he’s far more fortunate than his predecessor is in his co-star: Murphy wilted when set beside Redgrave, but Brendan Fraser holds his own against Caine. Like his excellent work in “Gods and Monsters” with Ian McKellen back in 1998, his turn as Pyle makes splendid use of his burly physique, his open, innocent face, and his general air of wholesomeness; he seems to excel in smaller films in which he’s challenged by working with extraordinary actors, and one hopes he’ll continue to have the opportunity to do so between such stuff as “Monkeybone” and “The Mummy Returns.” The remainder of the cast is uniformly solid, if unexceptional.

In view of the reluctance of Miramax to release “The Quiet American” for fear of offending audiences because of current history, one should note that the film is actually salutary viewing in the wake of 9/11. It would be unfortunate indeed if the present wave of patriotism were allowed to stifle serious debate about the wisdom of past American foreign policy. In any event, to view Greene’s novel as crudely anti-American is to miss its larger point, which is as critical of old-style European colonialism as of the newer US version that Greene sees as supplanting it. The point is made most clearly in the character of Phuong, who is, of course, a personification of Vietnam (or, more broadly, off all colonial locales). Phuong is basically treated as a kind of possession (though a valued one, to be sure) by the over-the-hill Fowler, who’s angered by the ease with which she transfers her allegiance to the young, virile American; and Fowler, with the world-weary experience of a European whose culture has already failed in the colonial game, both envies and despises the naivete of the US effort to cloak its own imperialism in altruistic garb (even if it’s no more absurd a justification than the Kiplingesque one which Britain espoused in the nineteenth century). The strength of Noyce’s film is that it enables the viewer to glimpse Greene arguing with himself over these issues without coming to some easy conclusion about them. And whatever its minor dramatic failings, the fact that it does so is valuable in the present climate.