The Constant Gardener
By Mark Harris
Starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. Rated 14A, Opens Wednesday, August 31, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

 John Le Carré heroes are not Ian Fleming supermen. If anything, they’re more like Miss Marple than James Bond, albeit with more angst and greater emotional turmoil. Their journeys are as much inner as outer, and what is most damaged in them invariably connects in some strange way with what is darkest in the outside world.

That Ralph Fiennes should play the lead in the movie version of Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, therefore, must be considered optimal casting, because Fiennes is about the only British actor who can beat Jeremy Irons at the secret-torment game; he’s also a dab hand when it comes to playing doomed romantic heroes. The casting of Bill Nighy as a ruthless British aristocrat seems equally true to form.

Where The Constant Gardener differs from expectations, however, is in its direction, the helmsman in question being Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, best known for City of God, the last cinematic word on crime in his homeland’s favelas.

Thus, when asked to direct Jeffrey Caine’s Le Carré-derived scenario, the Latin American filmmaker found himself less interested in the First World aspects of the story than he was in the Third.

For those unfamiliar with the book, the plot revolves around a corporate scheme to test dangerous drugs on Africans who must choose between getting with the program or dropping dead in the very near future.

Opposing this corrupt science is Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz), the younger, idealistic wife of Justin Quayle (Fiennes), a career diplomat serving with the British Trade Commission in Nairobi.

When Tessa is found murdered in the Kenyan bush, along with her African medical ally and possible lover, it looks like the work of bandits, but Justin is not convinced. After a lifetime of playing by the rules, this man with a pinstriped soul decides to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, using all his diplomatic cunning to travel from place to place without being spotted and seeking the answers to questions he was previously loath to ask.

It’s probably only fair to warn Canadian Le Carré readers that one of the places to which Justin does not travel in this wide-screen reimagining of The Constant Gardener is a "little town... three hours’ rail ride out of Winnipeg in the middle of a thousand mile snowfield". Whether or not the Prairie subplot in the book was cut out of the movie for reasons of economy - either narrative or financial - is anyone’s guess, but there is another, perhaps better explanation.

Although remaining fairly true to Le Carré’s text in most respects, wherever possible Meirelles has forefronted African villages and bidonvilles which, as he told one interviewer, made the slums of Brazil "look like Beverly Hills". In essence, what the director does is "de-Tarzan" the story as much as possible, making the audience as aware of the African victims as it is of the European angels and demons who are struggling for their souls (or at least their immune systems).

This combination of textual fidelity, political consciousness, and entertainment savvy (Fiennes will patently appeal to those who liked him best in The English Patient) has resulted in a first-class piece of commercial cinema, a diversion that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve wasted your time.

 

Please visit the other link pages on this site:
Ralph Fiennes Links Page

 Ralph Fiennes Astrology Page

Back to the Jennifer Lash Links page
 

Back to the Ralph Fiennes - Jennifer Lash Main Page

This page was created with the Stonehenge.ttf font and is best enjoyed if you
have the font yourself.  If you want it please click on the green name Stonehenge.ttf above to download and install it to your PC.
Sorry not available for Mac's.  Thanks.
 

These pages are Copy written by Mary Sibley.  All rights reserved.
Please do not use anything within these pages without permission.
Please send an EMail to Mary Sibley for permission, thanks.