The Constant Gardener Review
by Rick Ferguson (filmgeek65 AT hotmail DOT com)September 9th, 2005
Remember the good old days, when all the movie villains were Nazis? Of course, the original movie villains were Indians- John Wayne used to slaughter them by the dozen back in the day, until Arthur Penn's LITTLE BIG MAN debuted in 1970 and suggested that maybe the Indians didn't exactly deserve it. STAR WARS popularized the idea of the faceless villain- Darth Vader, the Emperor and the stormtroopers were all hidden behind helmets and hoods, the better to denude them of race, and the Empire required no more motivation to blow up the rebels other than that they were, well, evil. Lucas and Spielberg brought the Nazis back to the fore with the Indiana Jones series. James Cameron's TRUE LIES made Islamic terrorists the villains, and they served nicely until 9-11, when it became uncouth to offend our moderate Muslim brothers and we replaced Islamic terrorists with Euro-terrorists played by Alan Rickman or Sean Bean. Of course, that move threw a lot of Arabic actors out of work, because the only roles available to them in Hollywood were as Islamic terrorists, which nicely demonstrates the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Today, the only acceptable villains in politically correct Hollywood are white men- specifically, white Western capitalists. Movies such as SILKWOOD, THE INSIDER, ERIN BROCHOVICH and even the RESIDENT EVIL movies all postulate that the world's ills are perpetrated by white male-led capitalist cabals who lie, cheat and murder with impunity in pursuit of the almighty Dollar. They're protected by greedy, corrupt politicians and supported by murderous thugs. Only plucky heroines, intrepid reporters and falsely accused widows can bring these wicked corporations to their knees.
Viewed in this light, THE CONSTANT GARDENER is the most conventional of thrillers. It appears liberal and politically correct to its core. The villain in this case is the pharmaceutical industry, and the plot of the 2001 John Le Carré novel is a nearly wholesale rip-off of the 1993 Harrison Ford film THE FUGITIVE: a man whose wife is brutally murdered discovers that her death was just a minor side effect of a vast and sinister conspiracy led by Big Pharm. The wrongly-accused-man angle is jettisoned, but otherwise the plots of the two movies are kissing cousins.
Ralph Fiennes is Justin Quayle, a career British diplomat based in Kenya whose spitfire of an activist wife Tessa dies in an apparent car wreck after visiting a remote village with her partner in crime, Kenyan doctor Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé). Quayle is the bookish, cloistered type, and prefers to spend his free time tending to his copious garden while his wife is out saving Kenyan villages single-handedly and stirring up shit with the British consulate about the nefarious activities of a British pharmaceutical company in country to help with AIDS tests for the villagers.
Quayle, of course, begins to suspect that Tessa's death was no accident. As he pieces together scraps of information from Tessa's laptop, her friends and her secret stash of Important Clues, it dawns on him that he is indeed trapped in a conventional politically-correct Hollywood thriller, and that he's become a target himself. Stop me if you've heard this before.
And boy, does this film wear its liberal heart on its sleeve. In flashbacks, we see the Meet Cute, in which Tessa attends a lecture by Quayle and loudly denounces the Iraq war in front of a roomful of nonplussed students. Politics being the ultimate aphrodisiac, the two soon end up entwined in a tangle of limbs. Before you can say Halliburton, they're married and off to Africa as Quayle takes up his new post. The film then quickly establishes its predictable ground rules: the African villagers are exotic, doe-eyed innocents; the white politicians are universally corrupt; endless supplies of thugs exist to perform corporate dirty work; the United Nations is a benevolent institution performing important work. The film is supposed to screw you up into righteous moral outrage, and it often works. But you can't help feeling the cold hot-dog flavored breath of Michael Moore on the nape of your neck as events proceed to their inevitable conclusion.
What elevates THE CONSTANT GARDENER above this ground floor of mundane conventionality is the detail work. With 2002's CITY OF GOD, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles established himself as the heir to Steven Soderbergh. That film was an astonishing display of virtuosity (though due respect must be paid to co-director Kátia Lund), and most of the visual inventiveness and relentless forward momentum in CITY survives in GARDENER. Returning cinematographer César Charlone, meanwhile, casts the film in tones that alternate between naturalism and impressionism. In messing with the timeline and working in flashbacks, Meirelles and Caine aren't exactly breaking new ground- but the fractured timeline is critical to the film, as its revelations are driven not by the plot, but rather by the emotions of its grieving protagonist.
Let me say that again: this is a character-driven film. If you accept it at face value, then you're missing the point. Yes, the plot is straight out of Corporate Conspiracies 101. But its message is not really that big corporations do bad things- you only have to think of the words "Merck" and "Vioxx" to know what pharmaceutical companies are capable of. It's actually the story of a man who loses faith in himself, who comes to believe that his wife no longer loves him because he's no longer worthy of her love. That's a story many of us can relate to, whether or not we're being chased by corporate goons across the Kenyan desert. This crisis of faith propels the story, and its resolution provides the necessary moment of catharsis. The conspiracy plot itself is a red herring.
But in these dark days, even film criticism has become politicized. The current political climate forces us to choose sides, and we all line up against one another. But here's the news: both the liberals who would use this film to indict every Western corporation as a murderous combine run by imperialist dogs, and the conservatives who would use it to indict Hollywood en masse as a passel of pumpkin-headed Streisand clones, are completely full of shit and don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's time to reclaim the middle ground in this country. THE CONSTANT GARDENER is where I'm planting my flag.
***
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