The Constant Gardener does not assess the situation reasonably or make the slightest attempt to understand it from a balanced point of view. Still Le Carré has warned, as Kauffmann quotes, "[B]y comparison with the reality, my story [i]s as tame as a holiday postcard," and, as quoted in this 2 March 2001 Kaiser Foundation Daily HIV/AIDS Report, the actions of drug companies are "far more awful than anything [he's] written about." This is classic conman speak. Why on earth would he omit the most damning information he knew of? Would you write about the Nazi treatment of the Jews and leave out the extermination camps?

Lord of War

Le Carré confined these inane remarks to publicity for the book; writer-director Andrew Niccol incorporates similar sleight-of-tongue into his new movie Lord of War itself. At the end of Lord of War the protagonist Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), an international gun trafficker, is busted and then mysteriously let off the hook thanks to his dark, but unspecified, connections with the U.S. military. Unspecified connections--in other words, Niccol can hint at deep entanglements without providing any evidence whatsoever.

Yuri then goes on to claim in voice-over narration that the current President Bush is the biggest arms dealer in the world, and not only is no evidence provided, it's entirely irrelevant to the narrative, which has been an attempt at ironic romance about a man who gives in to temptation and loses his soul. But among artistic types, hating George Bush is enough to set you up as a political theorist, an intellectual, someone with something important to say. (Le Carré's stint in the British Foreign Service during the Cold War at least gave him a basis in actual experience for his earlier spy books.) It's certainly good enough for Niccol to use as a finish, giving Lord of War the most arbitrary, "provocative," all-talk ending since Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (without having given us the pleasure of watching Martha Raye.)

The movie has even bigger problems as entertainment. It supposedly sets out Yuri's story with novelistic detail--he's a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. from a family of four none of whom is fully able to take root in the new culture. They've settled in the Brooklyn of the 1980s, plagued by the gangsterism of their fellow immigrants, which sets Yuri to imagining how he can play the same game on a bigger scale. But the movie doesn't have the richness of incident, the cultural texture, the personal motivations of The Godfather, Part II (1974), which explains how the mafia arose in our Italian-immigrant ghettos. And Cage, way off form, and probably miscast, doesn't seem like a Ukrainian or a Brooklynite or a criminal. He's more deeply sleepy than even his Valley Boy persona would require; his body language and his voice in the start-to-finish voice-over never suggest the kind of drive that would push Yuri beyond the bounds of morality, at the cost of everything but some acorn-sized diamonds. This is a story along the lines of Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), but Cage never musters the energy for it. He compares his first gun sale to sex, but this is not a sexy performance, not even when he's literally having sex, and he doesn't come across as driven by lust, by greed, for money or power, by much of anything. Cage plays a man who brings a world of crime and death out of himself and yet in this movie he is what I never thought he could be--a dead wire. (The movie sorely lacks the show-off gusto he wasted on The Rock (1996).)