Little White Romance
The pharmaceutical industry is about to get another pain in the neck. If the recent mega-million-dollar verdict against Merck and its Vioxx painkiller didn't do enough to further taint the reputation of Big Pharma, The Constant Gardener, a new morally conscious thriller for the left, should only confirm the public's distrust.
Based on John Le Carre's 2001 novel, the film is a slick exposé of callous pharmaceutical giants and corrupt governments. But for all its laudable intentions, The Constant Gardener is the latest picture from "liberal Hollywood" (see also The Interpreter) to advance its agenda from a first-world, white perspective -- a point of view that ultimately clouds its potential power.
The erudite U.K. actor Ralph Fiennes stars as Justin Quayle, the constant gardener of the title, a mid-level, mild-mannered member of the British High Commission stationed in Kenya. As he tends to his gardenias, the evils of globalization are committed right under his nose. It's not until his headstrong, young wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is murdered in the bush that the dull diplomat arises from his greenhouse and stumbles upon a conspiracy of international scope.
Unbeknownst to Quayle, feisty wife Tessa was uncovering the dubious practices of a Swiss-based pharmaceutical firm and their testing of a new experimental tuberculosis drug, "Dypraxa," on unsuspecting Africans. "They're disposable drugs for disposable people," explains a doctor later in the film.
Such damning statements should satisfy viewers angry about Merck's recent egregious scam. And the same goes for our flashback introduction to the "privileged revolutionary" Tessa when she first spots Quayle at a lecture: She decries the failure of diplomacy in Iraq and dubs the undertaking "Vietnam, the sequel." But when Weisz's Tessa awkwardly backs down, apologizes for her outburst and inexplicably invites Quayle home for giggly sex, the radical heroine loses her edge -- as does the film.
As Quayle takes up his late wife's humanitarian mission, the film's conspiracy plot kicks into high gear -- referencing Robert Ludlam's "The Bourne Identity" rather than the modest, nuanced John Le Carre of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and "Smiley's People." The film's political intrigue also dovetails with Quayle's more personal quest to understand the love of his life. As both stories intermingle, The Constant Gardener reveals its underlying nature: It's just one more movie about white romance in black Africa.
Perhaps it's a good thing that handsome sophisticate Fiennes is associated with another such tale, 1996's similarly positioned Oscar contender The English Patient. While The Constant Gardener is not as syrupy as that doomed romance, the actor's high-cheek-boned presence makes glaringly evident the preponderance of films that follow European elites against a backdrop of African strife. As a side note, the greatest achievement of Hotel Rwanda may be simply the fact that its protagonist is a black African.
However, Fiennes, playing the reserved bureaucrat, delivers as solid a performance as Don Cheadle gave in Rwanda: both appear initially as figures of denial. (In Rwanda, the hotel manager happily caters to shady generals; in Gardener, Quayle insists, "We can't involve ourselves in their lives.") In many ways, these protagonists function as surrogates for the uninformed American audience member: journeying from uninformed naiveté to passionate advocacy. And yet, leaving the multiplex after the evils have been vanquished, moviegoers can feel they have done something good as well, and in turn, feel better about themselves -- and then do nothing at all.
It's a central fault of the white liberal guilt genre, with its palliative effect on the wounded left. A movie like Crash, as well -- a collision of simplifications and stereotypes about race in America -- resolves its many extreme black-and-white conflicts for the audience's benefit instead of confronting their own subtle prejudices. But gather a bunch of well-to-do blue-staters together after seeing the picture, and they'll think they've witnessed the second coming of the civil rights movement. Afraid not.
To his credit, Simon Channing Williams, the British producer of The Constant Gardener and no stranger to the left, having made some of Mike Leigh's most potent U.K. working-class laments (Life is Sweet, Secrets and Lies), asked a director from a developing country to make the movie. Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, hot off his violent Rio-set slum opus City of God, would seem an inspired choice to bring The Constant Gardener to the screen.
Using a handheld camera as he did in City of God, Meirelles snakes through the multi-colored throngs, cackling chickens and dilapidated shantytowns, capturing the electricity and chaos of African life. With its poverty-stricken population and rust-colored roads, rural Kenya recalls the ragged (and sometimes overly prettified) Rio de Janeiro landscapes depicted in Meirelles's celebrated debut.
Also echoing City of God, Meirelles places the camera up-close and eye-level with resourceful Kenyan kids. In one perfect, passing moment, a gang of ragamuffins place large rocks in front of the road to extort cash from the obstructed SUVs of tourists and dignitaries. These scrappy youths could have starred in their own movie -- a Kenyan riff on City of God. Unfortunately, their brief presence only adds local color; the camera must go onto track Quayle as he seeks out Tessa's secrets.
But imagine if the movie abandoned the ill-fated white lovers at the core of The Constant Gardener and focused on these African children -- how they confront their neglect and abuse at the hands of predatory pharmaceutical companies and governments willing to look the other way. It might not have made for the same kind of glossy Oscar bait, but as politically engaged cinema, that would have been the movie to see.
