Meirelles' adaptation of Le Carré is mind-candy for grownups.
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Fans of Le Carré will be grateful that the film version of his thriller doesn't tamper with or alleviate the angry darkness at its author's heart. Instead director Fernando Meirelles (
City of God
) asserts his raw visual gifts, using jagged camerawork to carve out a world so chaotically believable that when the final credits fill the screen, the audience doesn't rush out jingling its car keys. Instead everyone remains pinned to their seats by the final frames of the film.
Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz perform with enough intent to effectively blot out everything but their reality. As Justin Quayle, British diplomat to Kenya, the introverted Fiennes excels at being terminally pleasant-the kind of servant to the Empire who'll apologize when you bump into him. In one of the film's first scenes, when he's told his wife may have been murdered, he stares into middle distance until his features reform into an automatic smile: "Good of you to tell me…it can't have been easy." We'd dismiss him as a hopeless Milquetoast if it weren't for the facial expression we see next, when the coroner asks him to identify the barely recognizable body of his wife, Tessa (Weisz). Meirelles cuts nervily from Quayle's memory of their first lovemaking in London, overexposed and soft, to the pallid greenish horrors of the African morgue, its floor slippery with blood. As he looks down at her, a subterranean rage hardens on Quayle's face, and we see that there's more to this mild-mannered gentleman than we thought.
As he begins to ask uncharacteristically impolite questions, it develops that Tessa's political involvements in Kenya were more extensive than Quayle knew, and once trusted friends Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy) and Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston) attempt to sooth his suspicions by alter-nating threats with patronizing reassurance, treating his inquiries as the ravings of a bereaved man. When Quayle at last makes the connection between pharmaceutical companies, the British High Commission and a young Kenyan AIDS patient whose name has mysteriously disappeared from the hospital records, he's catapulted into intrigue, one step ahead of those who wouldn't bat an eyelid at murdering a countryman to silence the truth.
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Weisz (
Enemy at the Gates
) is perfectly cast for her ghostly role, curvy and impetuous, commanding the screen even from beyond the grave; as for Fiennes, age cannot wither nor custom stale the fact that he has the elegant recombinant DNA they'll clone in the future and harvest for parts. He's definitely back where he belongs playing the alienated expatriate whose nobility breaks when he witnesses man's inhumanity to man. Pete Postlethwaite has a vivid, crucial cameo as an embittered doctor who explains to Quayle (and us) how, in his words, pharmaceutical companies "fuck over Africa."
There are times we all want pulp, but that doesn't mean we want the criminally tedious stuff to which we're usually subjected. After the unhesitating accellerando of Meirelles' visual narrative-its shimmering, slashed color, its plunges into Kenyan tinroofed shantytowns and baked salt flats-
The Constant Gardener
has so taxed our frail ability to keep up with its swift chord changes, and has so violated our expectations, that it will take longer than the length of the credits to recover.
