Fernando Meirelles is clearly a filmmaker to be reckoned with, a man completely interested in using movies as a political vehicle. Constant Gardener is his second major work to come to the US and global markets following the celebrated City of God. Assuming he continues to find financial backing and distribution one can only assume Meirelles will continue to tell stories of power abused and sociopathic violence.
Where the earllier movie was the retelling of a true story, Gardener is labelled fiction and based on John Le Carre’s recent novel. Le Carre made his name with Cold War thrillers but with the passing of that age turned his eye to men using similar strategies for personal, rather than political, gain. But with the passing of that age the underlying equivalence of those two pursuits has become quite clear; one has to look no further than the interchangability of employment between the Bush Administration and energy industry corporations. So Meirelles rides this horse to switch from the narrow scale of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to the global marketplace of pharmaceuticals.
Working again with cinematographer César Charlone, we see terrific use of color, lighting, framing and transitions. Whether through the editing of Claire Simpson or simply being able to position his cameras in favorable places, there are many long panning shots that starkly contrast worse than Rio urban African slums against a modern core where foreign executives corrupt politicians and deaths are written of as inevitable (so might as well make use of them). A sea of rusting tin roofs slide by until, in the space of a frame or two, glass and steel buildings replace them, favored by trees and other greenery absent from the overpopulated ghettos.
The plot is simple enough: the title character, a mid-level Foreign Office functionary played well by Ralph Fiennes, marries human rights activist Rachel Weisz and the couple are sent to Kenya. Almost immediately Weisz is murdered, viciously, but Jeffrey Caine’s script flashes back and forth in time for the first half of the script so that the truth of Weisz’s character and her death is only slowly revealed. From then, once Fiennes returns to London, the story plays out chronologically but secrets are still parceled out parsimoniously. And despite being dead, Weisz is frequently onscreen–Meirelles uses her natural beauty and generous emotions as a means to personalize the film.
Fiennes does a marvelous job, Weisz is terrificly mysterious. Other significant roles are played by Danny Huston, as another British diplomat lost in the levels of machinations which surround him; Pete Postlethwaite (best remembered here as Daniel Day Lewis’s father from In the Name of the Father) as a drug developer looking for redemption in the desolation of a Sudanese refugee camp; Hubert Koundé as a Kenyan doctor conspiring with Weisz; Richard McCabe with a key third act cameo; and, a very different Bill Nighy than we saw and loved in Love, Actually, here taking a small role as an officious, self-serving knighted senior diplomat. There are a number of small parts played by what one can only presume are African locals, most well done, but neither the official site nor IMDB name many. An interesting ommision given the political slant.
Having praised Gardener for five paragraphs, let me take some space to point out a few flaws as well. Chief among them are a lack of focus on who Meirelles and Le Carre want to hold up for blame and odd bits of information tossed in uselessly that, if true (for the movie), would have certainly meant different choices would have been made by the characters. Most significantly among the latter is the revelation, perhaps 75% of the way in, that Weisz’s character was fabulously wealthy but had never revealed this to her husband nor used this wealth in obvious ways to further her cause or help the people she showed such care about.
The lack of a single, well-fleshed out villain is the worst sin though and almost destroys the film’s political value; in reality, no doubt all the types depicted here share responsibility but this is only 120 minutes and also not a documentary. From a plot perspective the fictional pharmaceutical company is the worst offender among the conspirators but is only briefly represented onscreen by a single executive, and Meirelles allows this man to offer contrition after falling from grace (his offering, by the way, is another throwaway bit not used again). The main government connection, Nighy’s Sir Bernard, has dialog in only three or four scenes and his local counterpart, the Minister of Health, even fewer.
In a novel this is much less of a problem because of the substantial larger space. The movie, though, is clearly a sales proposition: multinational corporations are using corrupt politicians to achieve profit goals without concern to the human cost because, after all, that’s not a debit on the ledger. To make the sale, Meirelles should have collapsed the novel’s cast so that viewers would come out of the theater angry at one or two easily identifiable real world correspondents to his villains but instead wastes energy across too many bad people to list here. Hopefully he’ll understand this for the next production.
recommended
BillSaysThis 