A Thriller out of Africa
Jan Stuart
August 31, 2005

 When a foreign film makes as much of a splash in the United States as did "City of God," it is almost inevitable that its director would soon be recruited to work his magic on a slick English-language film. That Fernando Meirelles would segue from a searing drama about Brazilian slum kids to a John Le Carre thriller, however, struck some of us as one of the unlikelier pairings since "Salaam Bombay!'s" Mira Nair strangled the life out of "Vanity Fair."

Skepticism gives way to an admiring, "Oh, I get it," within the opening minutes of Meirelles' pulsating adaptation of Le Carre's "The Constant Gardener." As with Nair's Thackeray interpretation, Meirelles tips the culture-clash scale of his literary source material, but to far more effective ends. It's still a "white folks illuminate the Third World" drama, but one in which the Africa setting becomes as vivid a character as the Englishman out of water who gives the film its layered title.

Ralph Fiennes brings a luminous concentration to Justin Quayle, a retiring British diplomat whose wife, Tessa, is found savagely raped and murdered in a remote part of Kenya.

Justin's low-key lifestyle had turned topsy-turvy from the moment he married the younger Tessa (a spitfire Rachel Weisz) in her days as a politically impassioned student. Accompanying him on his diplomatic posting in Kenya, Tessa quickly established herself an activist for the poor, campaigning with gadfly belligerence for improved medical services.

Jeffrey Caine's cunning screenplay depicts these events in flashbacks that are stealthily interwoven with Justin's investigation of Tessa's incendiary activities and her subsequent murder. Caine's strategies for unraveling that truth, which involves betrayals and conspiracies in high places, positions the audience with Justin in a conjoining place of suspicion and paranoia.

"The Constant Gardener" is a remarkably angry novel for such a gentlemanly genre writer as Le Carre, who seems to have a very personal stake in the doomed Tessa and takes no prisoners in his portrait of British bureaucrats. Meirelles honors that anger with a furiously alive blending of vertiginous camera play and shock-tactic editing, capturing shantytown life with an electrifying immediacy.

Compare this to the African intrigue of Sydney Pollack's spring-opener "The Interpreter," which seems to have been as inhibited by the cautious persona of its politicized heroine (played by Nicole Kidman) as "The Constant Gardener" is galvanized by the reckless Tessa.

The Mereilles approach feels so fresh that one may be inclined to shrug off the cornier cloak-and-dagger aspects of the film's final act. There is so much roiling in Fiennes' face at any given moment of "The Constant Gardener" that all of those kick-up-the-dirt car chases seem superfluous. It is comforting to know that, in his tireless commitment to doing Chekhov and Ibsen on the London stage, Fiennes hasn't forgotten how to be a movie star.

 

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