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Using a handicam in a jerky, rushed manner to give a cinema verité documentary appearance to a movie has hurt far more movies
than it has helped. It is useful and applicable in some minor instances, but it should always be used very sparingly. If not,
the movie will be dominated by this filming technique which only ends up being increasingly annoying as well as drawing attention
to its own inadequacy to tell a story.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why cinematographer César Charlone would let this filming technique crush what
could have been an inspiring story. Some others must have also thought that this was a good idea for this movie. In my opinion,
it isn't. "The Constant Gardener" as a story and as a movie is practically ruined by this cinematic conceit.
There is a wonderful story in this movie. Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a beautiful woman, a driven woman, marries Justin Quayle
(Ralph Fiennes), her polar opposite in temperament. You would never think that they would be a match. He is asked to substitute
for a senior diplomat at a lecture and later at the question and answer session she harangues him about current British military
policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and the country's apparent obsequiousness to the beck and call of the US.
The other attendees get up and walk out, insulted at her obtrusiveness and untoward behavior, but Justin treats her with
deference and respect for her passion and her commitment. She respects him for that and a later coffee turns into a late night
visit to her apartment accompanied by a bout of steamy sex. He is surprised and appropriately grateful the next morning.
Tessa later proposes any kind of relationship that will allow her to accompany him back to Africa. It will be his choice
as to whether she comes as a mistress, an associate, a confidante, a secretary, or a wife. He chooses marriage but he is not
at all sure that she will ever love a quiet, low key guy like himself.
But she does, as sometimes opposites attract. Justin's hobby, his passion, is gardening and he is her constant, her emotional
anchor, her support in her life and she quickly comes to love him for this. She also loves him for respecting her prenuptial
agreement that he will not put any limits on her social activities in Africa. She lives an unconventional life as she is always
traveling from one part of Africa to another, and it must have been very reassuring for her to have someone as trusting and
as understanding as Justin to be there waiting for her when she finally returns home.
Tessa is a committed social activist who quickly begins to stir the pot in the stew of African politics. Rumors of her
infidelity with a handsome African doctor, Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), with whom she has a close working relationship, begin
to filter back to him. Justin is troubled, but he keeps his mouth shut.
Problems spiral out of control when Tessa sends a report though Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), a fellow British diplomat
one step up the rung over Justin, back to London. The report so alarms London that Sandy is ordered to keep an eye on her
political activities.
In their travels throughout the countryside, Tessa and Arnold have discovered that remote African villagers suffering
from AIDS have to sign a medical consent form and then they quickly die for some unexplained reason. They find out that an
African medical distribution company called the "Three Bees" is passing out a drug called Dipraxa which is meant
to treat tuberculosis, not AIDS.
Three Bees is a joint venture formed by the international pharmaceutical company KHD and they have bribed local government
officials for access to all the medical distribution points in the country. Kenya was the site for this movie, but it could
have been any African country. Late in the movie scenes obviously appear to be taken from the Darfur region in the Sudan to
the north of Kenya.
London has a problem with Tessa because KHD has just opened a new manufacturing plant in a depressed part of Britain that
now has 1,500 new British employees. These jobs and the political payoffs guarantee that KHD will be supported in their corporate
activities wherever they may take place.
I have no problem with the politics in this movie as anything that sheds any heat on the ills troubling Africa is a worthwhile
endeavor in my mind. Not that we don't have the same problems closer to home in this hemisphere. Haiti, for example, or even
in Brazil, director Meirelles' home country and the source of inspiration for his last movie, "City of God."
In any event, the tragedies that continue to befall Africa are heart-wrenching and deserve something like a 50 year Marshall
Plan if only the rest of the world would have the courage and the will to step up to the plate. And the Africans would have
to accept the fact that we have every right to want to see that the aid is effective and isn't flushed down a rat hole or
otherwise disappears into numerous greased palms and empty pockets.
My problem with this movie is whether it wants to be a film or a Michael Moore style polemic. The poverty and the wretched
squalor as depicted in this movie is nauseating. Not that it isn't true and isn't worthy of notice, but this movie occasionally
wanders over the line to emphasize the wretched conditions of everyday African life instead of maintaining loyalty to the
arc of the story.
Sometimes the message, or the visual medicine, if you will, can be delivered with a tablespoon rather than with a brickbat.
If anything, this movie damages the message through overkill. I have to wonder that if the problems are this endemic, then
perhaps nothing can ever be done that will be lastingly effective.
Some might argue that this deplorable poverty IS the arc of the story, but I choose to disagree. It is only the background
to the story, the impetus that gives Tessa her passion to pursue her cause. The arc of the story is something which this movie
almost totally ignores, which is the illegal administration of Dipraxa, a tuberculosis drug still in test phase and found
to be fatally flawed.
We see many scenes of squalor and grossly unsanitary living conditions, but nowhere do we see Dipraxa being administered
to AIDS patients, nor do we have a clear understanding of what it does to them besides hasten their oncoming death. A mass
grave of some 61 dead hidden beneath a pile of quicklime is the only evidence, as indirect and insubstantial as it is, that
is offered as to Dipraxa's deadly efficiency.
Director Meirelles doesn't flinch from showing us the sordid poverty, but he does flinch from showing us visual proof
that Dipraxa is the real villain in this story.
We don't see the drug being administered, nor do we see the AIDS patients writhing in pain and death throes at some point
thereafter. This whole story is built on a rather flimsy gauze of indirect and hearsay evidence. My understanding is that
Le Carré's book is much more definitive on this matter than is this movie.
I also have a problem with the basic logic of the use of Dipraxa and KHD as the villain in this story. Not that this couldn't
happen, but it seems to me that Le Carré has more experience with political corruption than he does with corporate corruption.
The premise of this story is that Dipraxa is fatally flawed, so why not give it to African AIDS patients who are going
to die anyway? Other companies are working on the same type of drug, and KHD doesn't want to lose its three year window of
developmental advantage.
This would be perversely logical, I suppose, if the Africans were to be monitored in clinical tests, but none of this
seems to be happening. They are just given the pills and then they die.
Left unexplained and confusing to me is the economic motive behind all of this. KHD might as well flush the drugs down
the toilet if they don't follow the patients around to study and analyze the effects, benign and deadly, of the administration
of Dipraxa. Scientists and clinical researchers study these findings and this movie doesn't show that any of this data is
being compiled anywhere.
Also a point of conjecture in today's litigious society would be how helpful this three year window would be if KHD comes
to market with a faulty tuberculosis drug and then gets its corporate behind sued off just like what is going on today with
all the lawsuits over Vioxx.
If that is the case, then the whole theme of this movie falls flat on its face as there would be no reason whatsoever
to test this drug out in this highly unscholarly manner. Also note that the joint venture, Three Bees, is only mentioned as
a Dipraxa delivery mechanism, not as an analytical company.
So it seems to me that Le Carré has a straw man for a villain here, but so be it. In any event, there are enough bagmen
out there for all that KHD booty that Tessa gets herself brutally murdered out in the African desert.
Everybody on the take or instructed to keep their mouths shut by their superiors think that this quiet, mild mannered
diplomat will fade away into the mist about the death of his wife, but they are wrong.
This becomes the goal of his life and Justin begins to pursue it with a passion similar to hers when she was a live. Keeping
him moving forward from clue to clue across Africa, England, and Europe are the flashback memories of their all too few wonderful
moments together.
A final note would be that this movie has the same emotional story as "The English Patient," the 1996 movie
that went on to win the Oscar for the Best Picture that year. Both movies have Ralph Fiennes as their lovelorn star playing
a man deeply mourning the loss of the love of his life who died under tragic circumstances.
Both stories took place in Africa and both stories were told in many flashback scenes to emphasize the happier times in
order to dilute the tragedy of the present.
Anthony Minghella's Africa was remote, beautiful, austere and overwhelming. It was also filled with a sense of hopelessness
and fatalism, made as it was during the darkest days of World War II.
Fernando Meirelles' Africa is brutal, ugly, sordid, corrupt, and depressing. Yet, strangely enough, the many faces of
the young in this movie with so little going for them are filled with a joy and a hope that is the eternal blessing of youth
and an inspiration to a realist like me that doubts that the world will ever be a better place for them. Those poor little
souls who have suffered so much deserve to have at least a few of their dreams fulfilled.
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