Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Written by Jeffrey Caine
Based on the Novel by John Le Carré
Produced by Simon Channing-Williams
Music by Albert Iglesias
Cinematography by César Charlone
Edited by Claire Simpson
Production Design by Mark Tildesley

Cast
Ralph Fiennes (Justin Quayle)
Rachel Weisz (Tessa Quayle)
Hubert Koundé (Arnold Bluhm)
Danny Huston (Sandy Woodrow)
Daniele Harford (Miriam)
Bill Nighy (Sir Bernard Pellegrin)
Pete Postelthwaite (Marcus Lorbeer)

For most North Americans and Europeans, Africa still remains “the Dark Continent.” It lies cloaked under the darkness of ignorance. Very few people who live outside of the continent seem to know what happens inside its quilt-work of nations. News from Zaire blends with news from the Ivory Coast. We watch CNN and yawn when the anchor mouths a few sound-bites about some revolution or civil war in Nigeria—or was it Niger? Never could keep the two apart—before getting on to the more newsworthy hotspots of the Middle East or the domestic front. Maybe a mention of a benefit for AIDS victims in Africa (they have AIDS in Africa?) catches our attention as we flip through a magazine. Otherwise, Africa might as well exist only on maps and in fantasies like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels. (Which, I should add, I enjoy immensely.)

The Constant Gardener, a moral espionage thriller based on John Le Carré’s novel, rips open the slimy underbelly of our willful ignorance of Africa and lets its guts fall onto the abbatoir floor. Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat and the symbolic gardener of the title, through the activities of his crusading wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) awakens to the reality that Africans have turned into guinea pigs for corporate Europe. Africa has changed so much into “the other,” a distant land viewed through television, that an unholy alliance of governments and pharmaceutical companies can transform the continent into a testing laboratory. A few more hungry dark-skinned kids dead…what’s the difference? Nobody who can do anything about it will notice, and most people won’t care. Those kids would die of something soon anyway amongst all that poverty (an argument one character shockingly uses).

Posing as a murder mystery against the background of British post-colonial colonialism, The Constant Gardener is also a searing indictment of the First World’s view of the Third World, and a story of the awakening of one individual to the situation. The film works on the three levels of thriller, social commentary, and character study with ease, making for superb entertainment. Its message is woven closely to its story so that you never feel the presence of the dreaded “movie preacher,” an unwelcome lecturer who has intruded into more than one well-intentioned message film.

What does it take to open the eyes of Justin Quayle, member of the British High Commission monitoring aid effectiveness in Kenya? The death of his beloved wife, Tessa, in what appears to be an accident. The film starts with Tessa’s death in a jeep on a lonely stretch of African road, and through flashbacks for the first half of the film we learn how she met and married the cautious Justin Quayle and moved with him to Nairobi where she could fight her one-woman campaign to make the world a better place. Her death ignites Justin, a man initially ill-at-ease with the ‘save the world’ concept and more concerned with saving the people most close to him, to start slowly investigating the work that Tessa had done concerning ThreeBees and KDH, two pharmaceutical companies operating in African hospitals. Someone, however, doesn’t want Justin poking his diplomat’s nose into their lucrative business, and they make it clear he will share his wife’s fate if he does.

Although the majority of the characters are Caucasian Europeans (Koundé as Arnold Bluhm, Tessa’s partner in her probing into the seedy side of the health system, is the one exception), director Fernando Meirelles superbly keeps the poverty of African life in the forefront of the camera. Although Quayle travels to Germany and England on his search, Africa dominates the film, and the impression it makes will shock people: hovels and iron corrugated-roof shacks packed together without breathing room, garbage piles lining the railway tracks, hospitals that are no more than stick frames, and AIDS so rampant that all males are recommended to get testing for it. (Yes Virginia, their is an AIDS epidemic in Africa.) How easy this must make it for a man like Quayle to close his eyes and turn to the orderliness of his beloved garden.

Fiennes has made a few attempts at mainstream American stardom, but he simply isn’t the kind of actor to achieve it. He specializes in internalization. Even as the Nazi commandant in Schindler’s List, the film that brought him to public attention, he turned himself inward. The Constant Gardener gives him another chance to shine in this type of role, and he performs it beautifully. Paired with the very active and demonstrative Rachel Weisz only makes Fiennes’s coming to awareness much more potent. Tessa and Quayle make a strange pair, and the tension between them—their marriage seems either perfect or on the verge of snapping apart—makes Qualye’s search for the reason’s behind her death also a discovery of the way his wife looked at the world that he never understood. The story makes no issue of where its political sympathies lie, but it also shies away from crafting clear-cut villains and then jabbing an accusing finger at them. The most repulsive figure, Danny Huston as Quayle’s colleague in the High commission, isn’t a cold-blooded murderer or a corrupt CEO, but a treacherous lech whose oily friendliness elicits squirms any time he shakes someone’s hand or smiles. Most of the “villainous” people are busily painting themselves into corners, and it’s frighteningly easy to see ourselves taking their selfish actions and then throwing our hands up in the air as if to say, “Sorry, I thought I was doing the right thing, but it’s out of my control now.” Perhaps the most interesting character outside of Quayle is Pete Postelthwaite’s mysterious Marcus Vorbeer, a preacher-doctor who embodies the split consciousness of the European-in-Africa. The ambiguity of the characters helps create the aura of reality almost as much as the handheld, sun-soaked photography.

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