Love story that’s a constant delight
THE Constant Gardener is two movies in one: one’s pretty good; the other’s excellent. The pretty good film is a paranoid, anti- globalisation thriller. A minor British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes), who’s diffident to the point of passivity, discovers after the brutal murder and mutilation of his young, pretty, activist wife (Rachel Weisz) that his own government is complicit in some nefarious practices by pharmaceutical companies in Africa. So he tries to track down who killed his wife, and why.
As usual with John Le Carré thrillers, it’s all quite talky and aimed at well above the lowest common denominator. The most damning defect is that the principal villain can be guessed from early on.
And, as in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter earlier in the year, the film-makers’ faith in the United Nations is more than a tad naïve.
More damagingly for the film’s commercial prospects, the means by which our hero detects what is going on are over- simple and convenient.
Witnesses obligingly spill information even when it isn’t particularly in their interests to do so, and this adds to the air of the plot being well-tooled and mechanical, rather than totally convincing.
Too many of the revelations come through conversation rather than action, and the hyperactive hand- held camerawork and cutting of Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City Of God) serve only to emphasise the static, almost literary nature of the subject matter.
Meirelles seems more attuned to the hectic, colourful background of the African characters than to the relatively pallid western actors propelling the story in the foreground.
But in the way his film follows the westerners and leaves its sympathetic black characters to die, he unconsciously mimics the abusiveness of the capitalism he apparently deplores.
Where the film scores most highly is in its other aspect, for this is also the story of a reserved man who discovers the depth of his love for his wife, and hers for him, only after her death.
Weisz is a revelation, making her character earnest and secretive without being tiresome or humourless; and Fiennes is even more impressive than in The English Patient.
He uses one of his weaknesses as an actor — his lack of natural warmth — to show, very movingly, a decent but detached Englishman opening up even though finding himself on very poor soil in harsh conditions, like one of the nasturtiums he’s so keen on.
Some of the other casting doesn’t work as well. The American Danny Huston is fine initially at suggesting a weak-willed British diplomat, but his accent slips under pressure. Pete Postlethwaite struggles with his accent throughout, making his South African doctor sound like an audition for Fiddler On The Roof.
And Bill Nighy is uneasy in the role of a Foreign Office smoothie with a ruthless streak — he’s an actor who can’t conceal a naughty twinkle in his eye, and being Mr Nasty seems beyond him.
ALL the same, this is one of the few watchable films to be made with Lottery money, and qualifies as the most impressive adaptation of any John Le Carré thriller to make it to the big screen.
I can’t see it being a massive hit, for its appeal will largely be to the kind of intelligent, Left-leaning minority that tends to commission, make and review films, rather than the mass public that might pay to see them.
But it would be no surprise, in view of its right- on politics, fashion-
able director and two strong leading performances, to see it featuring strongly in next year’s Oscars. It’s worth seeing, if you’re in the mood for either a first- rate passionate love story or a secondrate cerebral thriller. But it moved me more than it thrilled me.
FROM THE opening pastiche titles in the style of Saul Bass,
is a much more
American- style thriller: violent
and priding itself on its wisecracking machismo.
Directed as well as written by
Shane Black, it recycles the kind
of buddy-buddy partnership he’s
favoured in previous hit screenplays for Lethal Weapon, The
Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Robert Downey Jr doubles as both star and smartalecky narrator (‘I’m Harry — I’ll be your narrator tonight’), and his superbly delivered voice- over is often very funny. He plays a failed thief turned aspiring actor, who comes out to Hollywood and shadows a gay private eye ( Val Kilmer, on good deadpan form) who would rather not have him around and regards him, not without reason, as a dumb, homophobic schmuck.
They become involved in a murder plot so convoluted it makes Raymond Chandler’s novels ( to which the film frequently alludes) look childishly simple. Naturally, there’s a Chandler- esque femme fatale (Michelle Monaghan), never more fatale than when wearing a Santa suit and packing a pistol.
As ‘ cool’, post- modernist, sub- Tarantino action thrillers go, this is an entertaining one with some great lines, and I was never bored. But it’s so pleased with itself that it becomes wearing. Black’s facetious delight in brutality and bloodshed is much more unpleasant than he intends.
He needed someone more objective to sift the good stuff from the bad in his screenplay, and give us a break from the relentless flippancy.
Most of all, he needed someone to make us care, if only a little, about who lives, who dies, and who loses a finger — twice.