The thicket of corruption, both complicit and implicit, active and passive, runs the gamut of the administrative, business and medical communities. As the story’s strands are extended in impressionistic, from-the-hip style, the portrait emerges of an emotionally contained rep of Her Majesty’s Government whose impassioned mate becomes a loose canon once she observes first-hand how new drugs are being used and tested on unknowing Kenyans, some of whom die as a result. Thus, the couple’s first round of joyful sex just after they meet in London is juxtaposed with Justin’s identifying her body after it has been found in a remote part of the country. Pic wisely retains le Carre’s cinematically non-linear narrative structure, which adroitly delivers the backstory of the relationship between middle-aged old-school diplomat Justin Quayle (Fiennes) and his live-wire younger wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), just as it delineates Justin’s increasingly perilous search into the whys and wherefores of her murder. Ralph Fiennes does some of his finest screen acting right off the bat with his quivering but controlled reaction to news of his wife’s apparent death. With the instincts of a muckraker, Meirelles tilts “The Constant Gardener” in the direction of a docu-drama, which gives the “revelations” of corporate greed and corruption modest but important priority in the overall shape of things.
In this telling of the powerful tale of a mild-mannered, middle-level English diplomat who falls more deeply in love with his wife as he stealthily searches for the truth about her life and death, the pic sacrifices emotional connection at the altar of political expose.
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Simply put, this film will probably not suit the tastes of fans who considered the sublimely nuanced miniseries “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “Smiley’s People” and “A Perfect Spy” the ne plus ultra of le Carre screen adaptations, but will likely please younger, less classically minded auds just fine. Employing the same helter-skelter style that brought vibrant immediacy to his international hit “City of God,” on which Meirelles collaborated with Katia Lund, helmer employs in-your-face camerawork to bring the Kenyan locations intensely alive at the same time, the rapid-fire approach is nothing like a visual correlative of the elegant relentlessness of the author’s style.
Meirelles, working from a script by Jeffrey Caine, has managed to arrive at basically the same destination as le Carre, but via a very different artistic road. Le Carre uses the sharpest of scalpels in performing a comprehensive sociopolitical autopsy on the remains of a murdered young woman whose provocative discoveries threatened to explode the hypocrisies, lax ethics, betrayals and assorted other ills of international pharmaceutical giants and government bureaucracies - Western and African - that support the use of Third World populations as guinea pigs. Although untempered anger seethes from all 560 pages of le Carre’s best-selling 2001 novel, it is channeled by the author’s acute ability to release it in precisely modulated quantities through the cracks in his characters’ fastidiously rendered British diplomatese.
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