Ray Pride

"The Constant Gardener" is a smashing surprise: a movie made quickly by a director with nothing to prove but who proves his prowess with a literate, agile, cosmopolitan thriller with heart and soul.

Adapted from John Le Carre's bestseller, "The Constant Gardener" is a bittersweet political thriller about modern corporate intrigue, but in Fernando Meirelles' telling (from a script by Jeffrey Caine), it is first and foremost a love story. Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a modest man, a diplomat, meets and marries Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a headstrong activist who is dead on page one of the book. The movie offers the same grave opening, shuffling time with the deftest touch, alternating love and terror, England and Europe, Nairobi and the Sudan, a story in which a man falls in love with his wife and everything she stood for after she is no longer within his reach.

The Brazilian Meirelles' (May-rhEL-Lehs) is best known in the U.S., of course, for "City of God," (Cidade De Deus, 2002) the quadruple-Oscar-nominated freight train of visual style and violence among children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. "The Constant Gardener" is equally vibrant in its restless look and pace, applying the techniques the 49-year-old director and his cameraman, Cesar Charlone, have mastered over several past decades working together (including on hundreds of innovative Brazilian commercials). Often handheld and shot with lightweight Super-16mm cameras, with point-of-view shots sometimes taken by the actors themselves, the effect is both breathless and lighter than air. (The editing by Claire Simpson is razory perfection as well.)

But another important element is hiring a South American director to adapt a story about the power structure of English society and contemporary corporate intrigues, working with as much fierce imagination to capture the look and feel of the shantytowns of Nairobi as London corridors of power. Simon Channing-Williams, best known as Mike Leigh's producer, was preparing "Gardener" with Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral") who bowed out in order to direct the newest Harry Potter movie. Meirelles stopped off in London from researching the African portion of his next picture, and his agent asked him to read Jeffrey Caine's script. "Kenya!" Meirelles tells me he exclaimed when he read the script; forty days later, he was searching for locations for its African and European settings. "I still don't feel like we ever finished the script," Meirelles says, describing a process that involved substantial rewriting on the set, improvisations by the actors (which add immense charm and plausibility to the romantic link between Justin and Tessa) and shooting almost an hour of scenes that were cut late in the process, including a lengthy chase scene in Winnipeg.

"We had a three-hour cut," Meirelles tells me. "What we had in this first cut was a couple of Kenyan characters, taking place only between them." The book also includes many passages in the forms of reports and communiqués and letters, "reports about pharmaceuticals, talking about real companies, numbers and pricing. I did the same thing in the film," Meirelles says. "I called a documentarist called Brian Woods and this guy has done a documentary called `Dying for Drugs.' Two years ago, it was broadcast by the BBC, a brilliant documentary. He produced for us a nine-minute documentary that was supposed to be inserted in the film. But it didn't work. When you were watching the film, suddenly Tessa would go to the Internet and watch this thing. It was too on the nose, the information was too much. It was sounding like my voice, y'know, the director's, sending his message straight [at you]... It's a pity, because it's a nice piece, but we'll include it on the DVD.

There were some people from production and Simon, they said, `This might feel a bit like preaching,' and I said, `No, it will work, I'll let you see it.' We watched the whole thing. He was right, I was wrong! It didn't work."

The finished version works like a dream. There are visual coups in the movie that took my breath away even when I saw the movie a rare third time. When Justin and Tessa meet, he's standing in for the government minister who's his boss, delivering a dull speech; he's challenged by Tessa, and as she questions him about the U.K. government's participation in the invasion of Iraq, blinds around the room are lifted, revealing they are in central London, overlooking the Thames River, the massive dome of St. John's Cathedral massed in the background. Charlone lets the light shift with an in-camera effect, an aperture change, from interior light to exterior bone white English light. There are other artful maneuvers throughout (including the opening shot using the same technique), but to describe them does not capture their force. More importantly, the performances are of a piece with the stylistic tour-de-force. Weisz is simply brilliant at capturing Tessa's empathy, compassion and connivance; Fiennes delivers a performance we've never seen from him, a man who grows justifiably more paranoid yet more compassionate himself as he learns the contours of the conspiracies that led to his wife's death. This is entertainment, but as grownup as entertainment gets, in its own way, like a "Casablanca" for the twenty-first century.

"The Constant Gardener" is now playing.

(2005-08-30)

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