THE CONSTANT GARDENER 

 Pharmaceutical companies are as bad as arms dealers, says someone towards the end of The Constant Gardener – and the frequent filmgoer may smile, recalling the life of an arms dealer from Lord of War a couple of months ago. The line might equally have claimed that pharmaceuticals are as bad as oil companies – which in turn would amuse anyone who’s seen Syriana, an exposé of shady dealings in that industry, coming soon to a cinema near you. Cynical but true: anything involving Big Business and/or possible exploitation of the Third World is flavour-of-the-month in Hollywood right now.

 This year’s slate of Best Picture Oscar nominees is the weightiest in memory: four of the five films deal with sober, public, capital-I Issues, from gay rights to racism to media ethics to the War on Terror (only Capote is concerned with private morality). Clearly, this has everything to do with George W. Bush. As Steven Spielberg, Oscar-nominated for Munich, put it last week, “I just feel that filmmakers are much more proactive since the second Bush administration … No-one is really representing us, so we’re now representing our own feelings, and we’re trying to strike back.”

 Fair enough – but what about Fernando Meirelles? It’s one thing for a British or American artist to rail against his government’s doings (most of the villains in Constant Gardener are Brit civil servants, and it’s based on a book by a UK author, John le Carré) – but Meirelles is Brazilian, known for his violent and kinetic account of life in a Rio slum, City of God (2002). Maybe he was just a hired gun on this project. Then again, maybe his exotic provenance adds to the film’s credentials, emphasising its sympathy with the exploited Africans it depicts. How can we accuse it of being patronising when the director is himself a Third World-er – even as he carefully translates African suffering into language a Western audience can understand, viz. Ralph Fiennes’ yearning for his dead wife?

 Strangely, City of God was a lot more disturbing, because it was a lot more primitive. Human life felt cheap in that movie, and the educated Western viewer had to consciously stop himself from sharing in the film’s unholy glee at crime and killing; it was Carnival time, a samba movie about violent death, and it gave a sense of living in that fetid, chaotic place. Constant Gardener, on the other hand, is well-meant and sensibly-proportioned – and Meirelles’ eye, Third-World fellowship or not, feels like a tourist’s. Inevitable gaggles of kids loiter at the edges of town-shots, headscarved old women are glimpsed doing something picturesque. Landscape is allowed to dwarf the characters, especially at the end when Quayle (that’s Fiennes) wanders through a garish miscellany of rocks and water.

 Quayle gets politicised through his love for Tessa (Rachel Weisz), the activist wife who asked too many questions and got bumped off. That’s the plot in its entirety – and the film’s biggest problem is a lame script that acts out this well-worn charade (has a middle-class white man ever found himself in a celluloid Africa without Seeing the Light?) with virtuous solemnity, as though its creaky joints could be rejuvenated with a slathering of right-on lotion and a dollop of melancholy.

 The pharmaceutical companies are of course evil; what they do is established early on (testing experimental drugs on sick Africans), so the only real drama comes in Fiennes’ reactions. He’s the Constant Gardener, pottering away in his shed instead of getting involved – though he’ll later be ‘constant’ in the other sense, i.e. faithful to her memory. “We can’t involve ourselves in their lives,” he actually says to Tessa when she begs him to rescue an African family. “These are three people we can help!” she replies – and the line actually gets repeated later, only this time said by Quayle to a higher-up, to illustrate his moral awakening: look, he’s even starting to talk like her! Let no-one accuse the film of being subtle.

 There’s a handful of very Le Carré moments – the moments when he sounds like Graham Greene, bringing people face-to-face with their mortality in inhospitable places. Deep in the Sudan, a corrupt South African doctor talks of when “God has your head, and the Devil has your balls”, sweating in the desert heat with murderous rebels riding closer. A cancer-ridden spook gives our hero vital information, wryly adding, “There’s something else we have in common, you and I: we’ll both be dead by Christmas”. Le Carré’s taken his readers on exotic moral journeys before (notably in The Honourable Schoolboy 30 years ago), but the strained, equivocal atmosphere still works – unlike the flimsy plot, or indeed the romance.

 I guess the film could be a different experience if you found Tessa beguiling and adorable; Quayle certainly adores her, and it’s because he never showed it – because he was too repressed, and can only show his love by paying homage to her after she’s dead – that the film is touching, at least in theory. My problem was, I didn’t like her much. Weisz does nothing wrong (she’s in the running for Best Supporting Actress), but Tessa is a shrill, pushy woman, a rich-family scion who’s turned activist but never lost her rich-person’s arrogance. She makes her husband look bad by telling off sleazy African politicians to their face; she rudely harangues a lecturer – who happens to be Quayle, that’s how they meet in the first place – with an anti-Iraq tirade, though she does have the grace to apologise later; she steals, lies, manipulates and even offers her body to get what she wants.

 How are we supposed to like this self-centred woman, much less accept her as the film’s moral centre? Simple. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘It’s the Cause, stupid’. Gardener’s universe is pre-conceived and one-dimensional: Big Business, government, middle-aged duffers in stuffy gentlemen’s clubs – bad. NGOs, Africans, poor folk in need of protection – good.

 Hard to argue with those priorities, but consider the source: the film is very much a Western concoction. As in Lord of War, Africa remains a Dark Continent, imperfectly glimpsed (Syriana, set in the Middle East, is much sharper); its hungry kids are as shopworn as the Foreign Office bods calling each other “old chap”. The film was made in highly sophisticated style, real hi-tech stuff – shot with a flat lighting plan (allowing its actors and director greater freedom) with the colour-scheme added in later, ingeniously, via digital correction. The result is big-budget activism, a call to arms made by armchair radicals, the First World using all its resources to console the Third. As one of the characters puts it: “This whole machine is driven by guilt”.