Director: Fernando Meirelles
Screenwriter: Jeffrey Caine
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy
One author, two different stories:
The Constant Gardener is a movie from 2005 based on a novel by author John le Carré, the man who also wrote the source material for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a movie which I recently reviewed here on my blog. Whereas I did not have many bad things to say about the adaption of Carré's spy novel, The Constant Gardener is a totally different beast, and the subject matter of the two films could not have been more different. In this film, Ralph Fiennes plays an English UN diplomat who lives in Kenya. Fiennes used to be a modest, calm and hard working man, but when his wife, a hotheaded political activist played by Rachel Weisz comes close to uncovering a gruesome conspiracy and ends up getting herself murdered in the process, Fiennes embarks on a quest to find out what actually happened to his wife, and find out why someone had her killed.
Politically correct subject matter = great movie?:
Even though The Constant Gardener scored very high ratings on sites such as rottentomatoes.com and metacritic.com, I personally had a very hard time describing my feelings about the film immediately after watching it. It seemed to be one of those movies that was destined to garner a lot of attention at the award ceremonies strictly because of its politically and morally challenging subject matter, in this case big medical companies who test their unsafe drugs on sic and poor Africans, but not because of the craftsmanship, storytelling and actual cinematic weight of the film. Disagreeing with the fact that corporate murder and abuse of the poor living standards in Africa is a horrible crime is very hard to do, and as such, I have a sneaky suspicion that this film got a lot more praise than it actually deserved. In general, it is important to remember that just because the subject matter is important and urgently needs to be discussed, the film is not necessarily either important or well made.
A struggle to choose between two identities:
One of the things that that I disliked the most about this movie, is the way in which it was shot. The entire film seems to be filmed with handheld cameras in an attempt to make it feel more like a documentary than a factional movie, but in my opinion, this element largely just served to make the film very annoying to look at. Sure, it might add a bit a realism to the over all product, but constantly having the picture shake like a chiwawa with Parkinson's decease gets very frustrating to look at extremely quickly. More importantly however, this documentary-esque feeling made the film seem very conflicted with itself, for more than one reason. If you are so obsessed with pointing out the realistic aspects of your film that you make half of it feel like a documentary and all of it look like a documentary, then why the hell not just make a documentary? You simply can not mix a slightly unbelievable and melodramatic love story about a guy who tries to uncover the nature of his wife's death with serious and hyper realistic depictions of the real world, without making your film seem totally self-conflicted and fragmented.
Realism or caricature?:
The Constant Gardener's main political agenda is to depict how big medical companies test their unfinished products on sic Africans, and shrug off the moral responsibility by telling themselves that "they were going to die anyway". Although this subject is both horrifying and interesting, the film depicts these companies and their representatives in such a cartoony and caricatured way, that I ended up laughing instead of trembling in moral outrage. Bill Nighy plays the most one-dimensional and stereotypical corporate big-boss that has ever been put on screen in this film, and this character's ridiculous behavior and over the top attitude completely obliterated the small amount of realism that the film had gathered through its documentary-like visuals. You can have as many shots of starving African kids waving at the camera in their torn clothes as you want, but when you put so much work into depicting how horrible a situation is that you forget how to tell a realistic and compelling story, your film is bound to feel conflicted and poorly made.
A most difficult genre:
In my opinion, this is one of those movies where the director and the crew behind the film cared so much about the subject that they were dealing with, that they lost the ability to tell the story they wanted to tell with an objective and sober attitude. I can easily see why someone would call this movie a masterpiece simply because of how morally challenging its subject matter is, but to me, The Constant Gardener relies way too heavily on its political agenda and way too little on actual cinematic craftsmanship to be hailed as being anything more than mediocre. The film reminded me a lot of Stephen Gaghan's Syriana from 2005, a movie which deals with international terrorism in a convoluted, one-sided and very subjective manner. In my opinion, both of these films got a lot of attention from the different award associations even though they were not very great movies, as a direct result of their political and internationally relevant subject matter. I personally do not think that the format in which these movies tell their stories work at all, and would much rather prefer to watch a documentary about their undeniably important and interesting subjects instead.
PS: I promise not to use the expression "subject matter" ever again.
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