The Constant Gardener

British novelist John Le Carre is known for his murky plots, his flawed characters, and his slow pace. If nothing else, The Constant Gardener, the latest of his books to be adapted to film, recreates Le Carre's disjointed and fragmented style very accurately, with its frenzied camera cuts and layered plotting. Like the prose it emulates, it is a style that I usually find to be a bit distracting, even while I appreciate its purpose. Life is often confusing and vague, and Le Carre's spy thrillers reflect that ambiguity. Unfortunately, when translated onto film, that music-video editing style tends to dissipate tension rather than build it. Traditional-style camerawork may have helped here.

But that is only a stylistic quibble. The movie itself merits a much more substantial response. This is a film that craves to be important, and to reveal and remedy social injustices.

Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a passive British diplomat stationed in Kenya, where he must, in addition to representating Her Majesty's government, keep his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) out of trouble. Tessa is a fiery social activist (in one of the film's many flashbacks, it shows how the couple met during a debate over the Iraq war) who has offended the wrong people. Two minutes into the film, she and her Kenyan friend are killed on a deserted stretch of dirt road, ostensibly by "bandits."

The mysterious circumstances of his wife's death lead Justin--tentatively at first, more aggressively later--to uncover Tessa's secret life. He finds that she was deeply involved in efforts to expose the British government's relationship with pharmaceutical companies that test advanced drugs on unwitting African patients. These drugs sometimes have lethal side effects.

The deeper Justin probes into his wife's work, the more disturbed he becomes. Has he been unknowingly abetting involuntary pharmaceutical tests all this time? Have people died while he looked the other way? After Tessa's murder, he can trust no one, not even his collegues in the British government. He launches an investigation of his own to vindicate his beloved wife's lifework. Along the way, he must comes to grips with what the final answer may cost him.

For a film of such subtlety, the political message is surprisingly overt. That message is undermined, however, by the film's latent disingenuousness--the fallacy that pharmaceutical companies, who sell live-saving drugs for profit, can do anything to please left-wing social activists. Assume for a moment that the main premise of The Constant Gardener is true: Pharmaceutical companies, in an effort to avoid years of laboratory tests and to get new drugs to AIDS-stricken Africa as soon as possible, sometimes test drugs on patients who are already dying. If it is occurring, the practice is, at best, morally ambiguous. But imagine if it was revealed that pharmaceutical companies had developed a drug that was 90% effective and would save thousands of lives throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but they would not release the drug for several more years due to safety concerns. I daresay that the same people who are most outraged that pharmaceuticals are testing drugs on dying patients would be doubly outraged if the pharmaceuticals withheld drugs from dying patients. It is a no-win situation for the drug companies, and, tragically, a no-win situation for the millions of AIDS patients currently suffering in Africa.

The Constant Gardener, despite its stylistic distractions and shallow political message, is fairly well-executed, well-acted, well-written and innovatively plotted. The music, a haunting mix of African folk music and melancholy chords, is particularly good. As a movie, The Constant Gardener is decent, but as a social commentary, it falls short. It is not as important as it wants to be.