The Non-stop Gardener

Directors
: Fernando Meirelles
: Jeffrey Caine (based on the unconventional by John Le Carré)
: Ralph Fiennes (Justin Quayle), Rachel Weisz (Tessa Quayle), Hubert Koundé (Arnold Bluhm), Danny Huston (Sandy Woodrow), Daniele Harford (Miriam), Bill Nighy (Sir Bernard Pellegrin), Keith Pearson (Porter Coleridge)
: R
: U.S. / U.K.

The Constant Gardener
is a somber, angry, cynical, slow burn of a political potboiler that is also, against all odds, an effectively moving be infatuated with story. Narratively fragmented and ideologically sharp, it goes right for the jugular of the ugly marriage of corporate and national power, recalling the tense Watergate-era thrillers of the ’70s that wanted to enrage as much as accommodate.

Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a rather dull, midlevel British career diplomat assigned to a post in Kenya. When the film opens, he is seeing his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), off at an airstrip, and in the next scene he is informed by his colleague, Sandy (Danny Huston), that she has been founded dead along with her driver on the edge of a dry lakebed. The film then drifts back in time, giving us the story of how Justin and Tessa, a fiery and dedicated political idealist, met and quickly married and of how her political activities with a fellow activist, an African doctor named Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), were constantly threatening the paint-drying march of British diplomacy in the Third World.

The core of Tessa’s work involves the activities of big pharmaceutical companies in Africa, particularly their testing of potentially dangerous experimental drugs on people “who don’t matter because they can’t be counted.” Tessa keeps Justin in the dark about her work, apparently part of their agreement when they got married. She appears to have kept other things from him, as well, including a possible affair with Arnold and others. In other words, after her death, Justin comes to the painful and awkward realization that he did not know his wife nearly as well as he thought he did, and his ensuing investigation into her dangerous work reveals as much about the woman he loved as it does about the nasty practices of the fictional pharmaceutical company she was trying to expose. With each of Justin’s new discoveries, Tessa’s memory teeters between that of an exploitative busybody who married Justin to use him and a martyred saint who kept him in the dark to protect him.

Based on John Le Carré’s 2004 novel,

The Constant Gardener

is the second major feature-film outing for Brazilian direction Fernando Meirelles, whose name was instantly carved in the cinematic map with his stunning 2002 film

City of God

, which had the energy and aesthetic inventiveness of at least a dozen films. Working again with cinematographer César Charlone, Meirelles pulls back on the visual splashiness, although not so much that

The Constant Gardener

doesn’t bear the obvious stamp of his background in commercials and music videos.

While Meirelles’ visual audacity worked powerfully in conjunction with the sprawling, multi-linear narrative of

City of God

, it sometimes feels tacked on to the more somber tonalities of

The Constant Gardener

. While not nearly as egregious as Tony Scott’s burnished visions of Mexico City in

Man on Fire

(2004), Meirelles tends to turn the African landscape into an overly heated fever dream of high contrasts and bleeding primary colors, apparently not content to let the actual locations speak for themselves.

Yet,

The Constant Gardener

works powerfully for most of its running time, on both ideological and emotional levels. It is charged with the strong performances by Fiennes, who transcends his character’s all-too-familiar story arc of rising conscience, and Weisz, who makes Tessa into a startlingly vital presence who bears the brunt of suspicion without ever losing full sympathy. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Jeffrey Caine (

GoldenEye

) gets too didactic at times, encouraging Meirelles to wear the film’s social consciousness a little broadly on its sleeve by giving us shots of dewy-eyed orphans staring straight into the camera, as if he is afraid we haven’t absorbed the severity of the situation by this point.

Not surprisingly, the more socially and culturally attuned critics have largely slammed the film, their well-intentioned hackles raised immediately at the prospect of yet another liberal-guilt movie featuring a white character adrift among dark faces in an exotic land. Yet, those critics would do well to consider the film’s audience and its potential for speaking to them. After all, the main problem with industrialized Western societies is that they are filled with people like Justin Quayle: fundamentally decent and concerned about the plight of others, but ultimately too comfortable in their own midlevel ruts to really do anything. The raising of Quayle’s conscience is but a small-scale metaphor for what needs to happen in all developed countries if the plight of countries like Africa is ever to be alleviated.

Overall Rating:



(3)

Thoughts? E-mail

James Kendrick

All images copyright ©2005 Distinct Features

This esoteric talent movie from Makhmalbaf senior is visually extraordinary, I suppose, in the self-consciously poetic manner of Paradjanov, but only if you can look past the stultifyingly whimsical nature of its allegory. Korshid is a green pretence fellow who works tuning musical instruments. Although his shelter is in arrears with the rental, the lad allows himself to be led astray en route to run by an unstoppable impulse to follow the sound of music. It is, one appreciates, a film directed from the inner eye - solely what the world’s been waiting exchange for, a structuralist neo-realist art melodious for blind kids.

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It would crop that the producers of “Introducing the Dwights” were looking to turn into another quirky indie comedy along the lines of “The Full Monty” or “Kinky Boots.” Unfortunately, this 2007 Australian suggestion does inconsiderable more than disappoint its audience with annoying characters and stereotypical situations.

From numero uno Cherie Nowlan (”The Wedding Party”) and TV writer Keith Thompson, and from the start titled “Clubland,” the flicks found few fans in America, where it saw alone a limited release. Once one sees the film, one can understand why Warner Independent Pictures pulled the up inappropriate. You take, it’s not really a “comedy” at all but, rather, a so-called “slice-of-life” anecdote almost equally divided between a mother’s downheartedness and a son’s coming of lifetime. But since neither the director nor the writer seems to have known definitely whose romance they were telling, the mother’s or the son’s, the result is something of a helter-skelter grab bag.

The mom is Jean Dwight (Brenda Blethyn), an aging stage funny whose act consists of playing a more abrasive Phyllis Diller, an annoyed housewife. Jean cannot view why the act isn’t more popular, blaming her ex-husband for her degradation, and she now makes ends foregather working in a canteen, tutoring progeny entertainers in her house, and intriguing to the boards at one go or twice a week at a townsperson nightclub.

Her son, Tim (Khan Chittenden), is in his early twenties and works against a active-van company. He’s craven, somewhat inarticulate, and inexperienced with women, making his intrigue with a supplemental girlfriend, Jill (Emma Booth), awkwardly sweet and touching. Which is more than I can hold in place of anything else in the picture.

Tim also has a mentally challenged brother, Mark (Richard Wilson), who, according to Tim, “was brain damaged at ancestry.” In spite of that, Mark seems smarter than anyone else in the large screen, and he’s the most moderate of anybody. Possibly that tells you something about the other characters, or dialect mayhap it’s supposed to be part of a symbolic message. I dunno.

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Tim’s father, John Maitland (Frankie J. Holden), divorced from his mom, is a depart-delay surroundings singer and a full-time security guard. Tim’s mom blames him seeing that destroying her career by dragging her to Australia when she could have been a good fortune in England. The engender has the best line in the movie when he tells his son, “There is no problem so grave that a fervid apology can’t resolve, settle accounts when you’ve got no plan what you’ve done wrong.”

The only other characters of interest are Kelly (Katie Wall), Jill’s witless roommate; Ronnie Stubbs (Philip Quast), a beefy-time entertainer; Lana (Rebecca Gibney), one of Jean’s friends; and Shane (Russell Dykstra), a traffic associate. None of them are important to the geste except to add needed color, variety, and maybe a little padding, and all of them come off as reasonably nonentities.

The two contemporary stories mean the progenitrix Jean’s endeavour at a comeback in the entertainment world and the son Tim’s attempt to leave home and live with his late-model girlfriend. To say that the two stories do not exactly mesh smoothly would be an understatement. They have all the hallmarks like they have a proper place in in personal movies.

Despite the boy’s excuse, Jean is central personage, and she’s mostly a grieve. She’s a pain to herself, a pain to others around her, and pain to watch. She’s so grasping and demanding, she won’t let Tim out of her sight notwithstanding a moment. She’s inconsiderate, thinking more of her career than of her sons, yet she needs them to reassure her constantly. Although none of these are uncommon behaviors in true enthusiasm, the film offers nothing that is well or strange to say forth them. The whole thing seems pretty commonplace and unchanging.