Coming home
Review: The Constant Gardener
* * * *
Justin Quayle is a mid-level British diplomat from a family of diplomats. He favours the proper, polite, official means of achieving small, carefully calibrated political goals with his measured gravelly bass. His wife, Tessa, however, favours the direct approach. Tessa (Rachel Weisz), whom Justin (Ralph Fiennes) meets and falls for when she squares off with him after an anodyne policy lecture he has proxied for, takes big steps such as embarrassing local tycoons and government ministers. And so big risks, particularly once Justin is posted to Africa, with its complex politics, its poverty, squalor and unpredictable violence, and its massive aid projects driven, as one world-weary character says, “by guilt”.
One of these projects, a pregnant Tessa discovers, is a plan by a pharmaceutical company to test a new TB drug on everyone with AIDS. Problem is, the drug may have rather severe side-effects. Tessa and a black doctor friend head off into the country to find out the truth. Their car is ambushed and both are killed.
His friend and boss Sandy (Danny Huston) is left to tell Justin the news of reports a white woman's car has been ambushed. Justin is tending his office plants. This is the end of the exchange: “How sure are you?” “It's not looking good.” There are no tears, no shouting, no emotional breakdowns. This is how things are done in the Foreign Service, through calm, logical, civilised actions. It's how a small island in the north Atlantic has managed progress and order across huge swathes of the world for centuries. But Justin, who slowly uncovers the details of his wife's life he had otherwise let pass, awakens to the reasons behind her passion and follows the trail.
What a stroke of brilliance to convince the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, who was behind the terrifically compelling City of God, to come on board as director. He finds vitality in Kenya's brilliantly colourful, crowded busy markets, shanty towns, open sewers. He finds hope in its dry red soil, which is everywhere, blowing over windscreens and the instant railway-side bazaars, everwhere except where the foreigners are, where pockets of lush plants grow in cool courtyards or champagne is guzzled in smart hotels at which security checks for car bombs with mirrors.
Then when Justin travels to Britain and Berlin in search of clues, and which his naivety and ineptness at espionage is harshly exposed, Meirelles' eye searches out the grey urban busyness, the bustle, traffic and constant construction. The only respite, apart from Justin's gardens, is the seductive mute prestige and leather of the St James club of a senior British diplomat Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy), whose blithely reassuring chumminess only gets Justin's juices flowing faster.
Tessa is never far from our minds, or eyes, thanks to Meirelles' frequent flashbacks. It's brilliantly effective, as are the techniques the director has brought with him: skewed angles, enough handheld camera to annoy the nauseous, kinetic editing, tribal soundtrack. But there's no tricksiness here, though: it all serves the story. And the telling and pacing is masterful through The Constant Gardener's 129 minutes.
Justin's conversion to bolshy agitator and caring visitor is too rapid, too complete for my liking. His breaking through those carefully constructed walls of rectitude are probably intended to show how completely Justin falls in love with his wife again. But then their relationship doesn't always ring true either, even if it's meant to be proven by lovey-dovey actions rather than complete honesty in word and deed. But this is a minor kink, which others may not agree with or perhaps care about.
This film, based on a novel by John le Carré, contains some flawless acting. Huston, whose married Sandy is also incidentally in love with Tessa, is the epitome of the romantic pragmatist: he hopes for the best but acts assuming the worst. Weisz takes Tessa well beyond the justice amazon role it could have been. And Fiennes, fresh from playing pure evil in Harry Potter, is unvarnished love and sacrifice. He figures out much later than his wife the true equation of Africa, politics and money = greed, selfishness and death, but he realises just at the right time the truth about himself. “Go home,” he is told. Save yourself. You don't understand, he says, with the conviction of a true believer. “Tessa was my home.”
* * * *
Justin Quayle is a mid-level British diplomat from a family of diplomats. He favours the proper, polite, official means of achieving small, carefully calibrated political goals with his measured gravelly bass. His wife, Tessa, however, favours the direct approach. Tessa (Rachel Weisz), whom Justin (Ralph Fiennes) meets and falls for when she squares off with him after an anodyne policy lecture he has proxied for, takes big steps such as embarrassing local tycoons and government ministers. And so big risks, particularly once Justin is posted to Africa, with its complex politics, its poverty, squalor and unpredictable violence, and its massive aid projects driven, as one world-weary character says, “by guilt”.
One of these projects, a pregnant Tessa discovers, is a plan by a pharmaceutical company to test a new TB drug on everyone with AIDS. Problem is, the drug may have rather severe side-effects. Tessa and a black doctor friend head off into the country to find out the truth. Their car is ambushed and both are killed.
His friend and boss Sandy (Danny Huston) is left to tell Justin the news of reports a white woman's car has been ambushed. Justin is tending his office plants. This is the end of the exchange: “How sure are you?” “It's not looking good.” There are no tears, no shouting, no emotional breakdowns. This is how things are done in the Foreign Service, through calm, logical, civilised actions. It's how a small island in the north Atlantic has managed progress and order across huge swathes of the world for centuries. But Justin, who slowly uncovers the details of his wife's life he had otherwise let pass, awakens to the reasons behind her passion and follows the trail.
What a stroke of brilliance to convince the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, who was behind the terrifically compelling City of God, to come on board as director. He finds vitality in Kenya's brilliantly colourful, crowded busy markets, shanty towns, open sewers. He finds hope in its dry red soil, which is everywhere, blowing over windscreens and the instant railway-side bazaars, everwhere except where the foreigners are, where pockets of lush plants grow in cool courtyards or champagne is guzzled in smart hotels at which security checks for car bombs with mirrors.
Then when Justin travels to Britain and Berlin in search of clues, and which his naivety and ineptness at espionage is harshly exposed, Meirelles' eye searches out the grey urban busyness, the bustle, traffic and constant construction. The only respite, apart from Justin's gardens, is the seductive mute prestige and leather of the St James club of a senior British diplomat Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy), whose blithely reassuring chumminess only gets Justin's juices flowing faster.
Tessa is never far from our minds, or eyes, thanks to Meirelles' frequent flashbacks. It's brilliantly effective, as are the techniques the director has brought with him: skewed angles, enough handheld camera to annoy the nauseous, kinetic editing, tribal soundtrack. But there's no tricksiness here, though: it all serves the story. And the telling and pacing is masterful through The Constant Gardener's 129 minutes.
Justin's conversion to bolshy agitator and caring visitor is too rapid, too complete for my liking. His breaking through those carefully constructed walls of rectitude are probably intended to show how completely Justin falls in love with his wife again. But then their relationship doesn't always ring true either, even if it's meant to be proven by lovey-dovey actions rather than complete honesty in word and deed. But this is a minor kink, which others may not agree with or perhaps care about.
This film, based on a novel by John le Carré, contains some flawless acting. Huston, whose married Sandy is also incidentally in love with Tessa, is the epitome of the romantic pragmatist: he hopes for the best but acts assuming the worst. Weisz takes Tessa well beyond the justice amazon role it could have been. And Fiennes, fresh from playing pure evil in Harry Potter, is unvarnished love and sacrifice. He figures out much later than his wife the true equation of Africa, politics and money = greed, selfishness and death, but he realises just at the right time the truth about himself. “Go home,” he is told. Save yourself. You don't understand, he says, with the conviction of a true believer. “Tessa was my home.”
1 Comments:
Yay! Rachel Weisz!
Nice review.
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