Originally published 9/13/2005
The Constant Gardener
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Writers: Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
Producers: Simon Channing-Williams
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Gerald McSorley, Donald Sumpter, Richard McCabe
I used to work for a company with a “friendly” but off-the-books relationship with a neighboring company that had a large library of purportedly-confidential material in a scanned database. If my boss announced at a meeting that “we” should study up on a particular text, I would know to go to my computer and fill out a little form on the Internet. That form would go who-knows-where, where it would be printed out and delivered to some other party, who would produce the requested manuscript, then send it on to a delivery person, whose cart would happen by our area on its rounds and drop it off so I could read it.
The Constant Gardener, a strong and compelling on-screen intrigue, is partially about the world where killing is achieved by the same sort of convenient arrangement. By the end one character plaintively and rhetorically asks – “Who has committed murder?”, and the truth is that it is difficult to pin down, because the actual task has been so thoroughly delegated. There are a lot of layers between the wealthy, whose accumulation is threatened, and that blue pickup truck with the armed men in back who come round your corner one day. The rich never pulled the trigger, although it’s inarguable that they are going to fortunately benefit from the regrettable bit of nasty business. How do you avenge a killing arranged by corporate will?
That question leads to what the movie, based on the novel by cynical spy author John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Tailor of Panama), is fundamentally about, and that is the love relationship between the very proper Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), and the very improper Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who will become Mrs. Justin Quayle before her very regrettable death out on a lake in the Kenyan countryside.
Justin Quayle is unfailingly polite and sympathetic at all times. He is a diplomat to his bones, so habitually seeing someone else’s point of view that when his friend Sandy (Danny Huston) comes to inform him of the discovery of Tessa’s body, Justin’s first response is: “It must have been difficult for you”. Later, when he wants the photographers snapping Tessa’s grave to leave, he thanks them for coming with a voice of choked anguish.
He is soft by upbringing – we hear diplomacy is the family line – as well as a bit fussy and dull, preferring to keep his nose down in the garden in his spare time and not accustomed to facing problems outside his brief. Ralph Fiennes, consistently proficient in the technique of building a character, adds something else here, too – it’s a kind of innocence, a suggestion that all this time spent dutifully ignoring the problems of the complicated adult world means there is a part hidden deep inside that never quite grew up.
It rears its head when he meets Tessa, a human-rights activist who poses some hot-tempered questions to him at a lecture and, afterwards, seduces him. Something happens between the two of them – whatever motives brought them to this bed (it is suggested around the edges of the plot that hers weren’t entirely pure at first), they pass through unconsciously into a new kind of existence, where the roles they play in their very opposite lives suddenly seem like a delightful game, one they can laugh about in this sanctuary. To see Justin Quayle’s eyes light up is to see how important this is to him. She will make the same discovery with time, that whether she knew it or not she needed someone like him – someone who is focused, and dutiful, and as the title indicates, constant.
When he is dispatched to Africa she insists on coming along and says she doesn’t care in what role. He decides it should be as his wife. Now, at parties with Very Important People, she can make impertinent accusations about the misery their greed and politics spread, and when Justin’s friends ask him to control his wife, he shrugs and answers honestly that he cannot. And he smiles, not that he lets them see it.
Trained to behave, Justin appreciates the presence of misbehavior even if he is not always sure what Tessa’s doing, touring the countryside with a doctor (Hubert Koundé) so regularly that people are convinced an affair is going on. In fact, it seems no one is convinced the Quayle marriage is a true love match. And then Tessa pieces together something very threatening to the interests of some rich people, and somehow ends up dead.
In a simple thriller we would expect to see the man chasing down the clues and catching his wife’s killer. But what is more important in The Constant Gardener, where “the killer” is a sort of abstract concept, is how Justin is doing more than solving a mystery – he is honoring his grief over the loss of nuisance-making in his life by finally making a nuisance himself. His constancy is devoted now to seeing what Tessa saw – everything she saw.
Director Fernando Meirelles made a splash in world cinema with 2003’s City of God, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. As with that movie we see him intimately interested in the street-level view of life in poverty. In energetic fashion, using wildly-varying color schemes, nervous camerawork, and cutting back and forth between Justin and Tessa’s romance and his post-mortem investigations, he submerges us not only in the rhythm and temper of a Kenya ravaged by disease and poverty, but Justin’s dawning awareness of it all. Before he could only nod with his colleagues about how sad it all was – later, we can tell he is transformed by the way he processes an argument that, well, those people were going to die anyway, so why not have their deaths create a few jobs for England and help a fellow countryman keep his stock prices up?
Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of the novel is effective though occasionally demagogic; the movie is better when yearning than it is when hectoring. Many of the actors are cast slightly-against type and thus give refreshing performances. Pete Postlethwaite is a vigorous doctor who must mix religion with pragmatism (he demonstrates how drug companies donate expired pills by the thousands, which they will write off and he must then incinerate so no one will swallow them), and Donald Sumpter is the friendly and posh Tim Donohue, who doesn’t really bother trying to pretend he is not a spy, but will chuckle modestly when people mention it at parties.
The world Le Carré’s story creates is a gripping and complex one, mixing pharmaceutical giants with rival governments, corruption at all levels, and billions upon billions of dollars that never seem to trickle their way down to the peasants scraping what living they can out of the ground. When so much is at stake, it’s no wonder people who create disturbances fall prey to misfortune. Sad, really, but who do you blame?