Fernando Meirelles makes a persuasive, troubling thriller out of a husband’s belated understanding of his wife. Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz give it feeling, though its African characters deserve more of its attention.
Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener is a moving political thriller, strongest when it stays close to a husband discovering how much he has failed to understand about his wife. Justin Quayle, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a diplomat investigating Tessa’s murder and the pharmaceutical corruption surrounding it. Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of John le Carré’s novel gives that investigation a second, more private purpose. Justin has to reconsider the marriage as he pursues the conspiracy, and the film gives both enquiries enough weight to matter.
Fiennes is persuasive because Justin’s reserve never looks like a performance of decency. He seems to need time to admit a feeling even to himself, and the effort gives the investigation much of its tension. Rachel Weisz’s Tessa has an impatience that makes their relationship convincing without making it comfortable. We were moved by the return to their life together: Fiennes makes Justin’s restraint look painfully inadequate beside her eagerness to engage with the world.
Claire Simpson’s editing lets the returns to the marriage alter our understanding of the couple, so the past remains an active part of the investigation. The non-linear telling gives us room to revise an impression of Tessa instead of fixing her in place as the reason for a man’s distress. Alberto Iglesias’s score supports the affection between them without insisting that Justin become any more demonstrative. It helps us take the relationship seriously while leaving Fiennes space to be awkward.
César Charlone’s photography is most persuasive in the Kenyan streets, where the activity around the characters keeps the investigation from feeling sealed off. The aerial views are impressive, but Meirelles’s insistence on movement occasionally makes a scene feel urgent before we know why it matters. Mark Tildesley’s production design makes differences in wealth easy to read, helping to explain the conditions behind the pharmaceutical story. Yet the attention given to the surroundings is not always matched by attention to the people living there.
This is the film’s substantial limitation. It is angry about pharmaceutical exploitation of the African poor, yet the people suffering it remain secondary to the English couple whose story brings us here. Caine and Meirelles spend so much care on Justin’s growing understanding that other lives are largely explained through what they mean to him. The anger is convincing, but we wanted the people being exploited to have more to do than provide reasons for his enquiry.
The plotting also becomes more tangled than it needs to be, and Caine occasionally makes us work harder to follow the conspiracy than to understand its consequences. Danny Huston as Sandy Woodrow and Bill Nighy as Sir Bernard Pellegrin help keep those passages watchable. Both make reserve interesting, with performances that encourage us to pay attention to how something is said. A little less narrative complication would have left more room for that kind of scrutiny.
As a conspiracy thriller, The Constant Gardener benefits from having a lead who never seems eager to be in one. Fiennes makes Justin’s reluctance worth watching, and the relationship with Tessa gives his investigation a force that complicated plotting alone could not supply. The 129 minutes ask for concentration, particularly when the private story has to share space with the corporate one. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and watch Fiennes as closely as the clues.
