The Constant Gardener [DVD] [2005]

This has been on my shelf for a long time. Not seen since the cinema release, and I had forgotten that I had felt nauseous because of the almost constant shaky, moving camera and odd angles, and occasional hysterical editing. I have to say the director Fernado Mireilles, for me went overboard on gimmicky photography for what purpose I don't know. A pity because this is a slow starter, but grows on the viewer as the plot thickens. Beautifully filmed on location, and it doesn't hold back, filming among the most appalling living coditions, but the mood is there, and just right. The acting and cast is great, except Rachel Weisz's character is very hard to like. Fiennes is fine (sorry), and what a support cast - Danny Huston, excellent as always, Donald Sumpter (one of our great un sung actors who always gives a good performence), Archie Punjabi, soon to move on to bigger things, Bill Nighy, slightly out of his comfort zone, the sexy Juliet Aubrey and Richard McCabe as "Ham". I honestly would have enjoyed this film so much more, if only the director wasn't on his mission to make a different kind of "art" film...but then, that is just my opinion, and can be joyfully ignored. Good plot, actors and price, so well worth a punt. (P.S. I am sure you are probably aware that this is not a typical Le Carre "Spy" thriller! No spies!)

I'm not usually a total watering pot when it comes to moving movies, but I'm afraid that this one left me with tears running down my neck. You know the collar-drenching type. It's the kind of emotional pain that only comes from truth, not fiction, and that's the core of The Constant Gardener: truth. The unbearable truth about Africa, and the collective culpability of the comfortable West in the continuing decomposition of an entire continent.It's the inescapable sadness permeating the film which made me itch to dock it a star or two. I mean, hey, I've been wallowing in a viewing diet of stuff like Britain's Got Talent, 10 Years Younger, and Deal or No Deal, where a parade of overfed, grasping halfwits frequently sob their hearts out over winning only fifteen thousand pounds when fifty thousand was in their box all along. Oh, the teeth-gnashing horror of it all. So, yes, a big part of me resented being yanked from my cloud of vegetative televisual candyfloss, and plunged into an acid bath of agonising realism. The irony is that our daily diet of 'reality' tv is anything but true to reality. It takes a beautifully made film, meant to be pure fiction, to bring me closer to the real truth. What a strange world we live in.Ralph Fiennes plays reserved diplomat Justin Quayle with understated elegance and real pathos. Quayle is the audience's route into the story; we take his path and make the same trip - at first seduced by the passionate activist Tessa, then, due to the punchy flashback sequence, almost immediately horrified by her murder. The movie does begin chaotically, but once you're in, you're hooked. The excellent camera-work echoes our status as Quayle's passenger; you'll grow closely acquainted with the back of his neck as you follow his journey. The camera angles during encounters all seem quite low, so you often get the impression of being a covert conspirator or semi-hidden eavesdropper. The sense of intimacy this provides soon builds and builds to a claustrophobic level; the director, Fernando Meirelles, knows exactly how to tighten the strings to produce just the right note of panic and tension. By the time Quayle meets with Sir Bernard Pellegrin (an impressive Bill Nighy) in a London gentlemen's club, you'll find yourself so attuned to the vision of Meirelles, that the otherwise opulent comfort and classical architecture of the club now both seem nightmare features of the most potentially terrifying of landscapes. Everything you see in the film, however mundane, is shaped through Meirelles's kaleidoscope of taut pressure and suspicion.There is action aplenty here for those who dread an overdose of contemplative quiet. But at the same time, the increasingly fevered pace of the plot development never sacrifices logic or compassion for the sake of cheap thrills. The cinematography itself is also quite breathtaking. The film, as a whole, is a very impressively balanced concoction indeed - skill and intellect blended with sensitivity and passion, with truth as the emulsifying agent binding it all together.There may be an inevitability as to the final destination, but you'll be no less riveted for that. Invest a few minutes of patience and thought at the beginning and by the end you may well find that your heart has been stolen. And broken.

This is a worthy piece of beautifully shot film-making with an especially subtle portrayal given by the male lead. It's unarguably a good thing that The Constant Gardener educates us all about the shady work done in Africa by multinational companies, but this film fought shy of tackling the real issue- what if anything should realistically be done about it. The actors were let down by an inconclusive and unlikely plot (the film's a heavily adapted version of the novel), that presents a wholly inexplicable match between a conservative British diplomat and an attractive and rich young woman whom everyone except the diplomat can easily spot is about to naively get herself in real trouble attacking vested interests abroad with links to the British government. The film is plotted as though the 1960s never happened and resistance to multinational crime is still at the stage of lone voices heroically but wholly ineffectively trying to present the truth to power (bizarrely in this film in which the British government are implicated, the heroine dies trying to report a pharmaceutical abuse to the very government who are complicit in the abuse). That said, one point the film did make very well is how impossible it is to save even one life in the context of endemic disadvantage and lawlessness as it exists in Africa - the remark is made as one child is thrown off a life-saving 'plane, "it's how things are in Africa". If this film had dealt more deeply with those complexities it would have had greater logical consistency, but it probably also would have been less palatable to its target audience.This is an angst-ridden film about Africa told almost entirely from a white upper-middle class persepctive. The film-makers set up a charity as a result of making it and say their director really understood the plight of all those Africans who serve as voiceless landscape in its background. In sum, this film is colonial but aspires to some form of post-colonial complexity that it just hasn't thought through. It does make you think though, but ultimately mostly about how rich and privileged you'd have to be to really think this kind of message was going to "save" Africa. The thing about guilt is, it's not an end in itself. Ultimately it's self-serving unless it's rigourously used to plot out a workable response for change.