| CARRE ON REGARDLESS : Fernando Meirelles' 'The Constant Gardener' [7/10] |
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| Thursday, 03 November 2005 | |
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First things first: though a tense, gripping and admirably ambitious thriller, The Constant Gardener must count as a partial disappointment, as it isn't up to the masterpiece level of Meirelles' last film, the brilliant City of God. An international arthouse hit, City of God earned him a 2002 Oscar nomination for 'Best Achievement in Direction' - and while welcomed by pretty much everybody who'd seen the movie, the nomination was massively controversial because City of God is credited to not one but two directors, and Meirelles' co-director Katia Lund was somewhat insultingly overlooked by the Academy. Perhaps Meirelles simply doesn't work quite so well on his own - this is effectively his debut feature as a solo director, as he also shared 'helming' duties on the little-seen Brazilian predecessors to City of God: namely Menino Maluquinho 2 (1998) and Maids (2001), co-directed by Fabrizia Pinto and Nando Olival respectively. John Le Carre's acclaimed 2001 novel The Constant Gardener must have represented something of a daunting challenge for Meirelles' de facto debut. It weighs in at nearly 600 pages, which scriptwriter Jeffrey Caine somewhat awkwardly condenses into a two-hour running-time for what is his third filmed screenplay after Goldeneye (1996) and Inside I'm Dancing (2003). A seemingly incongruous trio of credits, that, but The Constant Gardener does combine the globe-trotting scope of 007 (James Bond is even wryly namechecked at one point) with the interpersonal-relationship focus of the Irish disability heartwarmer. It doesn't quite come off, but in an era of dumbed-down Hollywood product Meirelles and Caine deserve credit for even attempting this kind of adult-oriented, relatively intelligent material - especially in the form of a paranoid conspiracy-drama with such a topically cynical attitude to corporations and governments. Only relatively intelligent, mind you: The Constant Gardener isn't really as complex as it would like to seem: the good guys are the good guys, the bad guys are the bad guys. One character in particular has the potential to transcend these limitations and engage in a genuine moral struggle - but he's very much in the background. This is Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), a mid-ranking official at the British High Commission in Kenya. The film opens (like the book) with Woodrow having to break some bad news to his colleague Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes): the body of a woman has been found on the shores of a distant northern lake, and it is believed to be Quayle's young wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz). From this point on the focus shifts to Quayle as he investigates the circumstances of Tessa's death - and we're never in any doubt that the widower, despite a few pangs of jealousy here and there, has never been anything but an honourable, decent chap motivated by the most commendable of impulses. Tessa, likewise, is a bit of a saint - a passionate advocate for the poor and oppressed, she devoted her energies to exposing the dubious practices of multinational pharmaceutical companies among the poverty-stricken of Africa. As the cast of characters accumulates - Sandy and Justin's boss, Pellegrin (Bill Nighy); Tessa's cousin Arthur (Richard McCabe); billionaire industrialist Curtiss (Gerard McSorley); Justin's associate Ghita (Archie Panjabi) - all of them slot quite neatly into the 'good' or 'bad' pigeonholes, and there they remain. Only Sandy retains a degree of ambiguity - which the film doesn't really know how to handle. As played by Huston (never the subtlest of performers) he's always too much of an obvious heavy - no pantomime villain, but certainly not allowed to develop into the nuanced, tormented, conflicted figure we might expect to find the focus of novels by Le Carre or, say, Graham Greene. Perhaps over the course of those 576 pages, Le Carre had the scope to fill in the light and shade sadly missing in Meirelles' film - even the awkward, offputting title isn't really explained, apart from Justin often being seen puttering about with his plants. More troubling is the fuzziness of the central relationship: in repeated flashbacks, we see Justin and Tessa meeting when she noisily (and implausibly) disrupts a lecture he's delivering on ethical foreign policy. They marry, but seem to conduct entirely separate professional lives, with Justin being kept in the dark about Tessa's "activities" - even as they come into direct conflict with the interests of his employers at the Foreign Office. This comes across more as a scriptwriter's (or perhaps novelist's) convenience than an organic development, as if everything was being neatly put in place so that Justin would eventually be forced into taking up Tessa's fearless quest for truth and justice. Aiding him to do so, meanwhile, is the very handy trail of e-mails and letters which fall into his lap at each stage of the journey, not to mention some very sub-007 shenanigans involving fake passports. These nagging queries aside, there is an awful lot to like about The Constant Gardener: the acting is first-rate across the board, Weisz again showing how far she's come by matching Fiennes step for step in a very tough role (although it's annoying that her character's age is given on-screen as 24, when Weisz is actually a decade older). The condensed nature of the screenplay means several performers have only limited screen-time to make an impact - including Pete Postlethwaite as a guilt-stricken medic, Juliet Aubrey as Sandy's wife Gloria (who has rather more to do in the book) and, best of all, a shamelessly scene-stealing Nighy, whose purring delivery gives a marvellously sinister sheen to lines as prosaic as "You should have had the meuniere..." Speaking of a marvellous sheen: as with City of God, Cesar Charlone's colour-saturated cinematography is first-rate, his camera capturing the savage beauty of Africa from the unpopulated lakes and deserts of the north country to the rusty roofscapes of the teeming shanty-towns. Claire Simpson takes over from Daniel Rezende in the editing chair, and her jagged approach gives the film an atmosphere very different from the standard Hollywood product. Everything about the movie, indeed, has a classily highbrow, slightly offbeat feel - even though some may heretically reckon that, on reflection, The Constant Gardener is arguably little more than an artily-shot, obliquely-edited cousin of Sahara - with ideas far above its station. Neil Young 3rd November, 2005 THE CONSTANT GARDENER : [7/10] : UK (UK-US) 2005 : Fernando MEIRELLES : 129 mins seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 3rd November 2005 - press show aka The Significant Garden (sic) |
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