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She preferred to spend her time - usually in the company of Dr. In that cozy, gossipy world, where the habits of colonial rule seem to have adapted themselves easily to the requirements of do-gooder paternalism, Tessa was always something of a scandalous woman, puncturing the hypocritical politesse of cocktail parties with rude questions about money, power, poverty and disease. "I feel safe with you," she says after they make love for the first time, and he, without saying as much, clearly feels more alive with her.īut for most of the movie, which is an elegant origami of flashbacks and foreshadowings, Tessa is dead, murdered in the Kenyan wilderness, where she had gone with a Belgian doctor of African ancestry named Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Kound), who many in the Nairobi expatriate community assumed was her lover. For her part, Tessa finds something attractive about his solicitude, and his refusal to take offense. Her outburst, which clears the room, provokes an oddly sympathetic reaction in Justin - a desire to comfort and protect this furious (and also very pretty) antagonist. They meet at a lecture Justin is giving on British foreign policy, after which Tessa angrily, tearfully challenges Britain's participation in the war in Iraq, as if embodying the caricature of people who hold such views as shrill hysterics. His young wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), is another story.
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le Carr's novel, is the uneasy, divided conscience of the liberal West.įittingly enough for a man in his profession, Justin is a creature of moderation and compromise, apparently without strong views of his own. Which is only proper, since the theme of the film, as of Mr. (Danny Huston is superbly creepy as Justin's two-faced friend and colleague, and the incomparable Bill Nighy shows a knack for soft-spoken villainy that makes you wish for a dozen sequels.) This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience. There is more to the film than a twisting plot and a topical hook, and also more than visual bravura, colorful locations and fine, mostly British, acting. Meirelles were not such a skilled and subtle filmmaker, and if his cast were not so sensitive and sly. This strikes me as noble, but it would also strike me as annoying if Mr. In pointedly applying President Bush's phrase "axis of evil" to multinational corporations rather than to rogue states, the movie shows a willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion. If what it says provokes some indignant rebuttal (be on the lookout for op-ed columns and public relations bulletins challenging its dire view of big pharmaceutical companies), so much the better. Meirelles's film actually bothers to say something about global politics. His words half swallowed, his features perpetually tinged with guilt, Justin is temperamentally unsuited to being the hero of a globe-trotting political thriller, which is part of why "The Constant Gardener" is an unusually satisfying example of the genre.Īnother reason is that, unlike most other recent examples - "The Interpreter," Sydney Pollack's hectic and empty star vehicle for Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn comes to mind - Mr.
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Justin's main qualities seem, at least at first, to be diffidence, his interest in gardening and a fumbling, selfeffacing kindness.
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Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose surname hardly suggests strength or decisiveness. In "The Constant Gardener," Fernando Meirelles s excellent adaptation of John le Carr's novel, Mr. It is hard to think of another movie actor who can be so convincingly shy, so protective of the psychological privacy of his characters. In his best performances, he commands the screen by deflecting attention, as though he wished the camera could hide him from our scrutiny rather than exposing him to us. Ralph Fiennes has a peculiar kind of negative charisma.