The Darkest Continent
Masterful update of John Le Carre's bestseller takes us into the hearts of darkness (Film Review).
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: A driving film that scores in every conceivable way.
The Downside: It isn't for those who shy from controversy.
"The are no murders in Africa- only 'regrettable deaths.'"
-dialogue from The Constant Gardener
The body of Tessa Quayle is found in an overturned Jeep, along a desolate shoreline in Africa. Her death wasn't an accident- before she was "dumped" she had been raped, tortured, and mutilated. Officially the death is ruled the act of marauding bandits who like to hit travelers on lone roads for money or supplies. Or perhaps she fell prey to some overzealous police officers who turn rather nasty when their demands for a bribe are rebuked. Either way, everyone seems to want to settle for an answer and get it over with.
The Constant Gardener tells two stories at the same time- how Tessa (Rachel Weisz) met the meek, unflappably polite junior British diplomat who would become her husband (Ralph Fiennes), and then events after her death, when Justin Quayle discovers a shattered mirror of disturbing questions surrounding the murder. Each of these segments of time, in turn, is composed of numerous elements that snake in and out of our range, but in the perfectly crystalline set-up for the film, every element, shot, and line of dialogue layers nicely. There is a richness here that you don't experience in many other movies, particularly ones labeled with the paltry title of "thriller," but there is also a deep-seated anger. The Constant Gardener is based on the John Le Carre novel of the same name, a story of big corporations playing craps with whole scores of lives on a continent where disease and violence are such an epidemic everyone is considered dead already- they just don't know it. It's like an animal clawing at it's cage, the howling indictment here of not only a free market allowed to run amok to the point of tragedy, but the apathy from those of us in the comfortable seats who make decisions whether or not to care about such events based on how it will affect our lifestyles. And it is more than a little chilling that Le Carre has said his tale is a mere "Christmas card" in comparison to the things he uncovered in his real-world research.
Tessa is a professional radical- in a flashback she dresses Justin down after a lecture on the so-called "goodwill" of Western diplomacy. While everyone else of a more moderate political stripe flees (hey, who actually likes conflict in their politics?), Justin admires Tessa for her outspokenness and her bravery. Through a series of painfully tender scenes they court, marry, and then Justin is transferred to Kenya where they suffer the worst possible tragedy any married couple could imagine.
Tessa's activist nature only gets a grooming as she's plunged into an abstract quagmire involving a British pharmaceutical company who is providing free HIV medication to the local native population in a "humanitarian" gesture. The movie feints and doges, giving us only fast glimpses of Tessa's married and professional world. Everywhere she goes she's accompanied by an accommodating guide named Arnold (Hubert Kounde), who seems to be in the picture far too often for Justin's comfort, especially after he receives an anonymous email informing him that Tessa and Arnold spent the night together at a hotel during one of their recent getaways. More ominously, there is also the issue of a report on human guinea pig drug testing given to a diplomatic official named Sandy (Danny Huston, The Aviator), a sneering reptile of a man who hides his ruthlessness behind a mask of banal civility. After Tessa's death, all Justin has are the remains of her life, puzzle pieces he begins to put together at the risk of his own. The pieces present a complicated picture- not just of conspiracies and corporate murder, but the things people do to maneuver their way through a world where anything you want, no matter how small, carries a price tag. For example, in order to bring the things she's discovered to the surface, Tessa makes a Faustian deal that is cold and cruel- and unfortunately pragmatic. Some movies are about good guys and bad guys. Movies like The Constant Gardener are about good people who sometimes have to stoop to bad things for the good of all around them. This is most evident in the film's disturbing, unsettling ending.
Justin himself is an appealing character. There's something about Fiennes, about his chameleon-like versatility that allows him to play savage or demure with equal amounts of power. In the early 1990s the actor had a string of films in which he played a masochistic Nazi commandant (Schindler's List), a charming but flawed intellectual (Quiz Show), and a fast talking con man (Strange Days). He even managed to steal the movie from Anthony Hopkins in 2002's underrated Red Dragon. What's amazing about all these performances is that some are more in-your-face than others, but each portrayal is so complete, and in its own way so vulnerable, that they make an indelible imprint on the mind. Here, Justin Quayle is a low-level bureaucrat who finds his passion and his way of associating with the world in growing and caring for plants. Justin is known, and sometimes mocked, by his colleagues for his apologetic, courteous demeanor. Even in a moment when he angrily waves off a horde of photographers who've descended on Tessa's funeral, he does it with a compulsory, "...thank you for coming."
Every element of The Constant Gardener is small but masterfully crafted. The plot and dialogue are respectful to their source, Le Carre, a man who was writing novels contrasting the vulnerability of nation-states and human morals long before I was born, and all of the acting is top-notch. I've already mentioned Fiennes, but he isn't in it alone. Weisz reflects the movie's blistering anger when she needs to, yet also turns believably sweet for the film's softer moments. Even the "bad guys" are several notches above stock. Huston's character, Sandy, is pretty much slime, yet like everyone in the movie he's compromised because he seems to love a little too much. Dark Water's Pete Postlethwaite appears late as a doctor whose actions are unclear.
Each delicate strand is strummed by director Fernando Meirelles, who was launched out of obscurity when he became a dark horse Best Director candidate for his 2003 gritty opus about love and death in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, City of God. Meirelles gives The Constant Gardener a skimming-the-surface feel with his (appropriately) shaky hand-held camera approach, and his stark visual contrasts (the overcrowded and suffering slums of Africa are painted in hot, bright primary colors while more "privileged" places such as the interior of an embassy or a "whites only" golf course are done in cold, threatening blues). But the visual sense is only a component to a vast interplay of character and meaning, message and detail. There are no weak links in this chain.
More than anything, The Constant Gardener is a seething polemic, a cool-headed yet aggressive movie in the tradition of All the Presidents Men and Network, a species which seems to be near extinction. Think about the last movies to garner any newsworthy attention- Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Day After Tomorrow, which garnered its controversy through a comic-book view of global warming. The Constant Gardener is an intelligent, at times painfully mournful film (especially the scene where someone tells Justin that Tessa's grave has to be poured over with concrete to thwart grave robbers), and if needed it can enjoyed strictly on the level of mystery and intrigue. But it is also a movie with a dark, tragic soul and a steel-belted conscience. A
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