THE CONSTANT GARDENER
Various cinemas
There’s a conspiracy theory afoot. And if you, too, believe that Rachel Weisz can carry a movie, then The Constant Gardener is for you. Weisz plays Tessa, a principled heiress who falls in love with a mumbling diplomat, Justin (Ralph Fiennes), the horticulturalist of the title. Posted to Kenya, the couple express their passion in the conventional postmodern style, by for ever making little digital films of each other. This comes in handy later on, since the whole story is told in flashback; Tessa is dead on arrival, so to speak, murdered beside a remote though happily photogenic salt lake in the north of the country.
It soon becomes clear that Tessa has been using her position in the crumbling post-colonial white elite to investigate sharp practices in the pharmaceutical industry. A giant corporation has been testing its wares on desperate locals, drowning in want, and, in many
cases, already dying of AIDS. Since her idea
of deep cover is tying a succession of brightly-
coloured cloths around herself à la Lady Hesther Stanhope (to the delight and gratitude of the natives), and loudly barracking corrupt officials at parties, it is not long before the forces of darkness realize she is on their trail, and violence inevitably follows.
The second half of the film is more interesting, and in practice more suspenseful, than the first. Justin moves from grief, through suspicion (Tessa’s womanly wiles having served her higher purposes on a couple of occasions) towards political radicalization and a strange emotional serenity. Fiennes’s stiff upper lip buckles like a suspension bridge in a high wind, and before long he finds himself hounded by the same agencies which so ill used his wife. He stays in the saddle long enough to finish what Tessa started, track down this story’s Mr Kurtz (an improbably accented Pete Postlethwaite) and fire off the decisive evidence by post – registered, one hopes. Fiennes is certainly easy on the eye. But his acting is inward-facing; all emotion and no action. He is like Eliot’s Hamlet in reverse; the facts as they seem are always in excess of his response to them.
The film is directed by Fernando Meirelles, whose Cidade de Deus (City of God) was a disco-fuelled rampage through the favelas of Brazil. Putting him in charge of a story like this was what any good civil servant would call a “brave” decision – though Scorsese didn’t make such a bad fist of The Age of Innocence (“It’s all about violence”, he said). Meirelles opts for the same style, here, as he did in the earlier movie – saturated colours, short takes, lots of camera wobble. Some parts work – the landscape, an early love scene, the bluster of cornered bureaucrats. But the parts that don’t are more important in this instance. There is
little or no moral ambiguity – testing flawed drugs on poor Africans makes Harry Lime seem like a decent cove trying to make a living in ifficult circumstances. All the colonials are bad, except our hero and heroine. All the black Africans are good, except one token despot glimpsed at a party, and several anonymous machete-wielding thugs whose badness is made to seem conveniently elemental.
The Constant Gardener is adapted from a novel by John le Carré, whose Cold War thrillers famously taught us that our national security was in the hands not of rug-chested epicures like James Bond, but dyspeptic time-servers who had long since lost any meaningful ethical sense. Le Carré’s work is strong on detail – the British television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy lasted nearly six hours – and the nitty-gritty which gives the present story what subtlety it has on the page is rather brutally dispensed with on screen. The tribal mysteries of the English bourgeoisie are similarly somewhat burlesqued (John Boorman’s 2001 adaptation of Le Carré’s fantasia on a theme of Graham Greene, The Tailor of Panama, was far better), though that may be a merciful relief for the film’s global audience. Interestingly, the largely British cast is expertly supplemented by the American Danny Huston, who plays one of Justin’s nastier colleagues as to the manner born, shuffling and smirking, binding the andle of his cricket bat like a hangman crafting a noose.
