The movie can't be considered a guidebook on how to expose drug companies' bad behavior because for the most part all Tessa does is speak up. She does write a report as well but then, like the kind of fool the melodrama requires her to be, she doesn't publish it but seduces one dirty guy into sending it on to one of the top guys in the conspiracy. (How valuable can her report have been if she didn't even figure out who was involved in the evildoing? We can't judge because the movie doesn't risk boring us with its contents.) Tessa does not form an organization, and you have to wonder, Why should a businessman or politician respond to what every overheated person says to him at a cocktail party or in a "report"? They would in this instance, of course, if they had the privilege we have of seeing the holy light of truth shining off Tessa. But they're benighted and so Quayle takes up Tessa's sword against them and becomes a man, not in realistically contemporary terms but in the venerable terms of chivalric romance.

Romance has its allure, of course, and this is certainly seasoned entertainment, with the bouquet of civilized moral rot that le Carré took over from Graham Greene. But the ambitions overfreight the story and the actors practically grunt with the effort of making it all at once judiciously novelistic, overripely sexy, throbbingly romantic, and morally exalted. The political ambitions of le Carré and director Fernando Meirelles are quite insistent, but the story feels like a story, not like the truth--it's both far-fetched and predictable. For instance, governments and corporations in The Constant Gardener operate with nightmarishly perfect synchronization. They not only hold together a coalition to work out the hitches in a potential blockbuster drug on the "expendable" population of sub-Saharan Africa, but when Quayle starts investigating his wife's murder they track him down no matter where he goes in five countries on two continents, even using a fake passport. They know, they see, they arrive. (And he, with his own convenient foolishness to match his late wife's, enters his German hotel room even though he hears a TV set playing that he hadn't left on.) The paranoia isn't even stimulating as it was in The Bourne Supremacy, for example, because the makers don't think of themselves as paranoid. The sex and action are bait for the politics; you are not really supposed to be having fun at this movie.

The Constant Gardener at least has the advantage of Meirelles's distinctive temperament. He has a photographer's eye but throws spectacularly "grabbed" shots on the screen in jaggedly rhythmed series and at times gets this art-house entertainment beyond the museum-quality pictorialness of David Lean's or Anthony Minghella's big-literary projects. In this 15 September 2005 CNN.com article, Meirelles says that he and his longtime cinematographer César Charlone never storyboard their scenes, preferring to shoot them on the go with a small, handheld camera. Meirelles gets the virtue of this method just right: "The camera is never in the perfect position, and I think this is what keeps this feeling of reality. The frame is not perfect." Meirelles and Charlone's imagery shows the world through the eyes of men so agitated by what they're seeing that they couldn't find words for all that the images mean to them and yet you get it--a direct jolt of visual expressiveness from their retinas to your brain.