WSJ review of Constant Gardener

A Tale of Global Bad Guys,
'Constant Gardener' Putters,
But It Doesn't Dig Deep

Taut 'Memory of a Killer' Delivers
Subtle, Sophisticated Thrills;
A Fun-Filled 'Crimen Perfecto'

By JIM FUSILLI
September 2, 2005; Page W1

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, novelist John le Carré was left without an iconic source of villainy for his cloak-and-dagger tales. In his 2001 best-seller "The Constant Gardener," he cast the world's pharmaceutical companies as the new global bad guys in his serpentine story of treachery, corporate corruption and murder set in Kenya. Now comes the film, a disappointment, even though director Fernando Meirelles and cinematographer César Charlone effectively illuminate the chaos and poverty of Nairobi and its neighboring regions as they did the slums of Rio de Janeiro in their previous collaboration, "City of God."

The brutal slaying in Kenya of the activist wife (Rachel Weisz) of British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) creates another sort of chaos. The murdered woman's male traveling companion has vanished, and there is evidence -- according to Justin's colleague Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston) -- that her death was the result of a lovers' quarrel. The suggestion that the dead woman might have betrayed her gentle spouse adds a jolt of intrigue -- as does the information that she had been challenging the practices of a drug company conducting dubious clinical trails among the Kenyan poor.

The film sags under the weight of its unwieldy ambition to be a political thriller, an unlikely love story and a glimpse into daily life in Kenya all at the same time. The result is a work thick with lurches and leaps this way and that, until late in the film -- when the disparate elements finally come together. It also lacks Mr. le Carré's deftness with nuanced characters: Here the good guys wear halos while the villains -- read businessmen and government officials -- play golf. Worse, several characters are defined, initially, through concealment and misdirection, a wobbly foundation for any morality tale.

The cast performs with a solemnity appropriate to so polemical a film. Bill Nighy is properly oily as a British High Commission honcho who tries to warn Justin against taking up Tessa's cause, and Mr. Huston is a friend no one needs. As the waif-of-steel Tessa, Ms. Weisz juggles ingenuousness and indignity. Though Mr. Fiennes' gardener-with-a-gun makes for an unlikely action hero as he careens across remote regions around the Sudan border and through London, to harvest anti-Big Pharma data, he manages to embody the dizzying passion that rules the Quayles.

With their hand-held cameras and what feels like a natural simpatico, Mr. Meirelles and Mr. Charlone give us an intimate view of the cruel struggle of daily life for most Kenyans. But all too predictably, we're ripped from their midst to return to the Quayles' rather familiar saga. In the end, "The Constant Gardener" is hardly more than yet another study of white, upper-middle-class martyrdom rather than the hard look at third-world suffering it might've been