It's a style peculiarly suited to Meirelles's international breakthrough City of God (2002) in which the seductiveness of criminality for the teeming hordes of poor children in Rio de Janeiro practically unseats your reason. How can you live in a world in which this goes on, decade after decade after decade? The formal exhilaration of Meirelles's imagery gives you some perspective on these structureless lives tending inevitably downward, and because photography provides a way out of poverty and crime for the young hero (as it does for the kids in the documentary Born Into Brothels (2004)), the movie suggests the power of vision.

Finally, however, City of God is more like a Warner Brothers gangster movie such as The Public Enemy (1931) that show you hoods headily rushing down the slide to hell than it is like the full-grained neorealism of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946). City of God is even more brutally matter-of-fact about the pleasures of sociopathic self-assertion than a Cagney picture, and it has a destabilizing aesthetic excitement that the American gangster movies of the '30s lack, and none of the unconvincing piety of Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), for instance. But Meirelles is almost too excited--his script can't quite account for the thrill he's transmitting to us with his depiction of these deplorable situations. (Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990) has a similar disconnect.) The events in City of God have been shaped on the outside but not on the inside.

Meirelles's style is a robust but crude expressionism, which in The Constant Gardener is best suited to the scenes set, and shot, in Kibera, the Kenyan slum that Tessa visits with a native doctor. (She peculiarly insists on giving birth in the hospital that serves the slumdwellers, as if to say, "If it's good enough for the locals it's good enough for me," though the moviemakers clearly think it isn't good enough for anybody.) Unfortunately, in the rest of The Constant Gardener Meirelles's style is noticeable in less meaningful ways. For instance, he shoots the preparation of a banquet meal the way another director might shoot a mortar attack and Tessa and Quayle's initial sex scene could function as a parody of certain perfume ads. The sequencing of remarkable shots is intentionally nerve-jangling, but it can also be "lush." Although certain stretches of metallically discolored mud are the site of two murders, the way they're filmed makes you want to ask your travel agent about them.

The Issues

Generally I prefer to discuss a movie in aesthetic terms--narrative structure, acting styles, visuals--i.e., the area of a critic's competence. It feels sort of ridiculous to set my soapbox down next to le Carré's and Meirelles's and try to shout them down, but I'd like to explain that while their reliance on narrative formulas reduces le Carré's intended political message to pulp, the message itself is flawed.