THE CONSTANT GARDENER (R) ***1/2

 

Directed by Fernando Meiralles. 129 minutes.

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, David Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite and Danny Huston. Released by Focus Features.

 

Brazilian director Fernando Meiralles is shaping up to be one of the most interesting filmmakers around. He has taken the reigns from director Costa Gavras as the poet of the impoverished and has become, with only two films, a most angry and daring filmmaker. His first film, City of God, might be the best debut I have seen in the past five years. That film chronicled the drug wars in the ghettos of Brazil. With The Constant Gardener, which is based on the novel by John Le Carre, Meiralles has made a film much like Gavras’ political thrillers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Z or State of Siege. Like Gavras, Meiralles uses the thriller genre to rail against corrupt political regimes and, in this film, multimillion dollar corporations that exploit environments in poor countries where life is already cheap.

 

In the film, Ralph Fiennes plays a British diplomat named Quayle who instantly falls in love with a young activist named Tessa, who is played by Rachel Weisz. They fall in love and she asks him to take her to Africa, where she becomes involved in trying to stop a gigantic producer of potentially dangerous medicines from testing their product on AIDS victims and poor people in the small African villages. At the beginning of the film, Quayle finds out that Tessa has been brutally murdered with a doctor friend, whom is believed to be her lover. I am not giving away important plot points here, as the film is completely centered around Quayle’s determination to find out what happened to his wife, and then continue her mission.

 

Meiralles makes a wise decision by playing the scenes of the actual story out of order, not only because it creates more of a mystery, but, similar to a film like Memento and Irreversible, the impact of the film is not in the end of the story, but in the little moments in between, at the beginning and spread throughout. Meiralles also told the story of City of God and this seems like a good choice of storytelling for him as a director. The film also bears his frantic handheld camera style, which also creates a sense of unease in the film, as Fiennes’ character wanders throughout the African landscape, never quite sure if he is in the same danger that his wife got herself into.

 

The film is loaded with good supporting players, including Danny Huston as a bureaucrat friend of Fiennes, who may or may not play a larger role in Tessa’s death than we think; Bill Nighy as the heavy; and Pete Postlethwaite as a doctor, who may also hold a key to the mystery of Tessa’s death. Weisz is good in her scenes, most of which are told in flashback, and Fiennes gives his best performance here since 2002’s Spider.

 

Meiralles has translated well into English and is making interesting career choices. Unfortunately, a lot of great foreign film directors get sucked into the Hollywood vortex and lose some of their daring and their own style when they shoot their first film in English. Though I liked City of God better, The Constant Gardener- also very good, is, in many ways a much more daring film. This is an angry movie, which combines the passion of Meiralles the director with the critical pen of author Le Carre, whose novels, in recent years, have become more and more distrustful of British and American foreign policy. It is rare that a Hollywood studio releases a film this political, especially in the current climate. Then again, Focus Features is the studio responsible for Traffic, Far From Heaven and The Motorcycle Diaries- all films that do not shy away from overt political statements, and that all happen to be great movies, I might add. The Constant Gardener is an appropriate film to end the summer, as it is officially the last film to be released in August. It has been a summer full of thoughtful movies, despite what you might hear from some critics, and this film certainly deserves to be ranked among the best of them.