Spoilers Ahead: Proceed With Caution

The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener, adapted from the literary thriller by John le Carré, is the most idiotic and irritating political melodrama since Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Although a straightforwardly crusading effort, The Constant Gardener is no more to be taken seriously than the Harrison Ford suspense blockbuster The Fugitive (1993), in which the wife of a similarly mild-mannered protagonist is also murdered for reasons having to do with the testing of new product by a pharmaceutical company. By figuring out who killed their wives, both the constant gardener and the fugitive turn into traditional truth-seeking romance heroes.

The Fugitive is an uncomplicated, if lumbering, melodrama in which the hero's best friend and colleague (Jeroen Krabbé) is unmasked as the man who has suppressed negative trial results in order to bring a problematic drug to market and then framed the hero for his wife's murder to prevent exposure. It's a dopey premise: apparently the villain thinks he'll get richer faster by rushing past bad results, but at the expense, surely, of exposing the company and himself to potentially ruinous liability. In any case, the moviemakers did not imagine they were making an important statement about pharmaceutical companies and so had the good sense to include lots of action high points and to build up the role of the U.S. marshal chasing the hero so that in the role Tommy Lee Jones could entertain even those bored by the story.

By contrast, The Constant Gardener is intended as an impassioned indictment of the testing of drugs on poor Africans--in order to receive any medical attention at all they have to "consent" to treatment with unproven drugs, some of which have lethal side-effects. The pharmaceutical companies aren't working alone, however, but in collusion with the diplomatic wing of the British government and the enforcement power of the Kenyan government. The key to the political inflation of the melodrama is the fact that the wife is not just an unfortunate bystander, as in The Fugitive, she's an activist working to expose the nefarious doings of all parties.

John Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a diplomat who is quaintly obsessive about gardening, meets his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) in London when he gives a speech in the stead of his higher-up and she stands and delivers a rambling, cliché-filled rant against the current Iraq war. Tessa's grandstanding is of a kind I've witnessed countless times in my bicoastal academic career--the party may see herself as Joan of Arc but it's hard to imagine what she thinks she's accomplishing. Tessa is somewhat abashed afterwards, but then later, once she has married Quayle and followed him to his post in Kenya, she purposely asks embarrassing questions of one of the conspirators at a cocktail party and it's clear the movie considers her heroic. Tessa is, in fact, the model after which Quayle, awakened by her murder, remakes himself into a hero, and the allegorical structure of the movie is designed to tell those concerned about the state of the world to lift their gazes above their own little gardens, to stop quailing and being diplomatic and to speak up, anywhere, everywhere. Whether or not doing so could conceivably have any effect, I presume.