It feels good when other people treat you like you’re smart, and the same holds true of movies. “The Constant Gardener” is a political drama that assumes you’ll be able to keep up.
Here is a tiny example of that: In an early scene, set in a hospital where Rachel Weisz is about to give birth, Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite can be seen in the background. If you don’t notice him (or don’t know who he is), it won’t damage your understanding of the film, but if you do notice him, it deepens your appreciation of “The Constant Gardener” because Postlethwaite doesn’t show up again or speak a line of dialogue until the movie is 105 minutes old.
So the effect of that brief, early appearance is to make us wonder about Postlethwaite for nearly two hours. It’s a brilliant technique because the actor and his character haunt the movie, exerting an emotional pull disproportionate to Postlethwaite’s brief screen time.
That’s just one of the smart things director Fernando Meirelles (an Oscar nominee himself for his Brazilian “City of God”) does in “The Constant Gardener,” which begins with Weisz’s death and then flashes back and forward as Justin, her remote, diplomat husband (Ralph Fiennes) tries to figure out why. Was she killed because she was careless (there are hints she may have had affairs) or because she knew too much about the goings-on in Kenya, where they live?
Based on John LeCarre’s novel, “The Constant Gardener” looks back to ’70s thrillers in that it believes the world is controlled by a shadow government of wealthy men who can make a deal or have an enemy killed with one phone call. Weisz’s character also believed in that world, but Justin, who puts the “dip” in “diplomat,” busies himself in his garden and convinces himself that fairness always wins. Then his wife dies and, as he investigates, he begins to open his eyes.
Meirelles’ film doesn’t feel much like a LeCarre novel – it’s brasher and more disjointed than LeCarre’s elegant writing is – but it captures the writer’s moral outrage. Mireilles creates a great scene, for instance, in which the camera pans from an impoverished shantytown to the posh golf course right next door, neatly underscoring the idea that some people think they live in a world of their own, isolated by money, but the smart people know we’d all be better off if everyone realized we’re all in this one world together.
“Gardener”shows the Fiennes character shifting from the former group to the latter group. Skittish and withdrawn at the beginning of the film, Fiennes saves his strongest emotions for his final scenes, when Mireilles pulls back to show us that even Africa is one place that appears to be two places.
Yes, it is devastated by disease, poverty and harsh weather, but you can’t see any of that when the camera soars over its deserts and savannahs. From that vantage point, all we can see is beauty.
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