The Constant Gardener and Lord of War don't begin to give the situations that they fictionalize their due, though The Constant Gardener is infinitely more skillful than Lord of War, which is both a mess and dull. Le Carré is a bigger cultural player than Niccol, of course, but there appears to be no difference for him between reality and a melodramatically compressed version of reality. Both le Carré and Niccol slight the issues but nonetheless pride themselves for their political "passion," which in the form it's given in these movies is even more recreational, even more useless, than Tessa Quayle's "speaking up."

For a real-life version of the left-wing heroic romance of fighting the pharmaceutical companies in Africa, see this 1 May 2001 Salon.com article about my fellow Yale Law School graduate, and friend, Amy Kapczynski.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.