The Constant Gardener 2005 (dir:Fernando Meirelles)

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Restaurant Review - Darkside, Melbourne by pastytraveller

by Cornelia at 19:45 on 25 October 2005

In an opening scene which echoes the close of ‘Casablanca’ and marks out the romantic territory, Justin Quayle, (Ralph Fiennes) a low-ranking High Commission officer, bids farewell to his wife at a dust-swept airfield in Kenya. She leaves accompanied by an African doctor. After a shot of the wheels of an overturned truck in the desert, Justin learns of his wife’s murder. He identifies her badly injured body and in flashback recalls their relationship.

This began when well-bred activist Tessa (Rachel Weisz), spoke out at a ministerial press conference in London, blaming Blair for helping Bush to attack Iraq, a metaphor in miniature for the film’s content. Whilst hardened journos slink off in embarrassment, Justin offers to take her out for a coffee. In what seems to the bewildered bureaucrat a spontaneous gesture of generosity, she beds him and proposes marriage shortly afterwards. Apparently sidestepping any vetting procedures, she is soon making a nuisance of herself in Africa, helping the local black medic and courting infidelity rumours which her husband tries to ignore by losing himself among his beloved plants. Her secret late-night computer conversations with a fellow activist indicate she is involved in some kind of under-cover work. After gaining admission to a local hospital where her child is stillborn, Tessa confides to one of her husband’s shiftier colleagues, Sandy, played with suitable shading by Danny Huston, that the imminent death of a fellow patient, whose child she suckles, is deliberately induced.

Tessa’s death is Justin’s cue to leave his job and try to find out what she was looking for, aided by the considerable sum left to him in her will. When his passport is confiscated, a suddenly materialised brother-in-law of inexplicably Latin ancestry, and his computer nerd son, enable him to seek out Tessa’s fellow-conspirator in Berlin, an encounter that is witnessed by mysterious watchers in a marauding limousine.

Faithful to the complexities of John Le Carre’s novel, this ‘multi-layered’, (i.e. hard-to-follow ) conspiracy tale’s great strength is its cinematography, the noise and colour of Africa virtually branded onto the screen, so that townships, interiors and remote dust-swept villages come to resemble a recently used Fauve artist’s palate. Europe, and the chief villain, a chill Bill Nighy, are by contrast painted in tones of grey and blue. Ralph Fiennes’ character makes Hugh Grant look decisive, but the actor hints at steely determination, helped by his steely eyes, whether he’s wrapping a tender green shoot or accepting a similarly wrapped gun from a well-wisher. The latter motif is a reminder of the director’s depictions of sudden violence in ‘City of God’ where he exposed conditions in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. As in this film, a corrupt regime provided the backdrop. Rachel Weisz’s beads and ethnic prints do little to soften her patrician aloofness. Other characters, apart from Sandy, are too sketchy to allow the actors much scope or credibility.

The action fuse is slower than with factually-based films ‘Hotel Rwanda’, and ‘Shooting Dogs’; fizzling through a welter of encounters which range from a disgruntled golfer to the desert-hermit Peter Postlethwaite, all adding pieces to the puzzle as they refuse to take personal responsibility for atrocities. The villains are at last unmasked in an unlikely disclosure scene that recalls, appropriately enough, Earl Spencer’s speech at Lady Di’s memorial service.