Universal Home Video DVD
2hrs 9mins
Director: Fernando Meirelles
“The Constant Gardener” begins with the silent aftermath of a murder beside a lonely Kenyan lake with only a flock of soaring birds as its witness. The murder is deliberate, an outward assault for a cover-up of a larger, and silent, annihilation of possibly thousands more. The secret, however, is not a government detention camp or a mass grave, it is something more sinister and oblique than Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) could imagine. You see, it is his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) who has been found dead, her body burned and mutilated because her persistence for the truth leads to the discovery of a possible conspiracy to systematically decimate the poorer populous that had been lead astray.
This is the labyrinthine plot of the “The Constant Gardener,” based on John Le Carré’s equally wonderful complex book. It is a rarified film, one that takes Le Carré’s dense structure and ambiguities of diplomatic duties upon foreign soil and translates them into a careful collage of shady businessmen, human rights crusaders and stoic husbands. It is also the re-introduction of director Fernando Meirelles, whose “City of God” exploded onto screens in 2003 and cunningly assigned the director to the role of “poet of the streets” to American audiences. It is in Meirelles’ hallucinated images, courtesy of cinematographer and collaborator César Charlone, that the Kenyan shanty towns are translated into vibrant meccas of life, making the tragic landscape of events even more chilling.
As the tempered Justin begins to unravel the mystery of his wife’s death, he begins to see where his own evasions of conscience have led him. In his flashback tale of meeting and falling in love with Tessa, we begin to understand why Justin goes from passive bureaucrat to widowed crusader against the megalith ThreeBees Corporation, whose unchecked experimental medication and vaccinations to combat polio and AIDS are being administered to a populous that no one would cares to know. Screenwriter Jeffery Caine treads a thin line between preaching and entertainment in these passages, revealing just enough treachery to entice the audience to avoid proselytizing.
What actually works for the film is its bleak drawing room espionage that is the heart of all of Le Carré’s work. What could have felt like a leftover from the cold war, with sinister characters mixing at the most exclusive of cocktail parties and in mahogany ante rooms, the film captures and re-energizes. The aloof themes of power and its abuses, always difficult to portray especially when it comes to the most well-mannered of villains, seem all too real here, especially in the wake of the “Enron” debacles of our day. It is the aura of an omnipresent menace that “The Constant Gardener” best evokes in its burnt, sun-bleached images whose government outrages are best summed up in the weathered tome: “Business as usual.”
–Joe Ramirez
