Ah, those British in Africa. Besides setting fashion trends for Ralph Lauren to follow in perpetuity, they sure did stir up a whole lot of trouble. In THE CONSTANT GARDENER, set in present-day Kenya, the shenanigans of the Brits are examined through the lens of political payola, big business, and one man's broken heart.
The action gets started when Tessa, the political activist wife (Rachel Weisz) of Quayle, a soft-spoken British bureaucrat (Ralph Fiennes), disappears and is found murdered. Mrs Quayle is the type who believes fervently that the world is made better one person at a time, while Quayle, ever the uptight Brit, places his faith in big efforts. In a tender moment, his wife describes him as a man "who dreams of a world without weeds." Quayle must overcome his natural tendency to trust and follow the rules as he unravels the intrigue and cronyism surrounding her fate. He is thrust from the gentle world of his gardens (where he works to develop disease-resistant food plants) into a world he can barely believe exists, a world full of pay-offs, hired killers, and unethical research where his dreaded weeds would be the really, really good news of the day. And don't you know that big pharmaceutical companies, the movie criminals of the new century now that the Nazis are all dead and the South Africans have changed their tune, have a hand in all the trouble that's going on.
Director Fernando Meirelles (nominated for an Oscar for CITY OF GOD), updates John Le Carre's thriller with a harsh, unsparing look at urban Africa and its still victimized people. At the same time, his camera lingers on the natural beauty of the African landscapes, in a sense asking us how far we have really come from the Rift Valleys where Lucy first took a walk. Seeing the poor in the crowded cities, seeing inside the elegant, insincere, and almost insensate walls of the Colonial mansions, watching men sell out their friends or worse, it is easy to think that we have not come very far at all. For Quayle's story suggests that the trappings of civilization are thin indeed and, for the right price or with the right motivation, any of us could step out of them and back into the wild.
Mostly though, this is a story driven by love: Tessa's love of the Africans and Quayle's love for her. The movie jumps back and forth in time, allowing us to learn the Quayles' love story as well as catch glimpses of the trail that leads Quayle to the truth about Tessa's murder. The movie weaves a spell of loss: of lost love, lost innocence, the lost people of Africa, the lost and corrupted vision of the Empire. The acting in this film is exemplary. I am not always a big fan of Ralph Fiennes (I mean, really, RAFE?), but here he is superb as the befuddled gardener of the title, thrust into a world where words and life itself are often meaningless. His transformation is the movie's heart, and it will move you.