The Constant Gardener 2005
Without a Cold War to write about, John le Carre turned his attention to corporate intrigue when he wrote this book. There are still a lot of the same elements and the line between business and government gets blurrier all the time. As states and countries compete to get new factories or businesses, will they stop at generous tax break packages or would killing someone to get 10,000 new jobs be okay? Capitalism is a lot more cut-throat than the Cold War and with enough money on the line, anything can happen.
My problem with the movie is similar to my problem with Le Carre in general. I tried to read one of his books (I believe A Perfect Spy) a while back and found it incredibly hard to read, focusing on tiny things and background while it went absolutely nowhere before I gave up on it after about 50 pages. I remember reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and thinking what a depressing ending it had. I also remember trying to watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on PBS when I was in high school and how it was so boring and George Smiley did so little that I just couldn’t get into it. This movie rolls all of that together.
I thought the story was interesting and the acting was very good, especially Rachel Weisz (who won Best Supporting Actress) and Ralph Fiennes, but there are some standout side performances as well. Director Fernando Meirelles does some interesting things but tends towards use of a shaky cam that not only shakes but zooms in and out and goes in and out of focus. He doesn’t use it so often that it made me dislike the film, but I see it as the director’s way of starring in his own movie: Look at me! Here I am behind the camera! So that was annoying, but other touches I found out about in the DVD extras were probably pretty good. Rather than set up a totally controlled environment on the city streets in Nairobi, he would just film. Any white person walking through a shantytown is like a movie star anyway, so the actors just interacted with people as they stared or talked to them. That probably meant there was a lot of film not used, but it is effective. I also thought the sound was uneven, at times dialogue is very quiet and hard to hear, but when some action scene takes place it would be too loud. I was constantly changing the volume and towards the end I turned on subtitles so I wouldn’t miss what they were saying.
The problem with the whole story is that as Ralph Fiennes goes searching for the truth about what his wife was doing, there are twists and turns, but basically he finds a handful of people who know what is going on and they just tell him the whole thing whether it makes sense for them to spill the beans or not. Maybe this is a shortcut that the book didn’t have to take, but it seemed like he didn’t do that much to find anything out or do that much about it once he did find out things. So it was interesting to watch and there are a few minor twists, but it was kind of hard for me to sink my teeth into. I could see how if it hit you right, you could think it was a very, very good movie, but it didn’t hit me that way. Still, it is pretty good and I’ll give it a B.
Written: 02 Jul 2006