Here are some films which have Oscar-contender written all the way through them like a stick of rock. This version of John Le Carré's 2001 novel is conceived on a grand, almost operatic scale with fervent and passionate performances from actors who come the new year may need shopping trolleys for the all the statuettes. Like The English Patient, there's a fair bit of grandstanding, but this film more than carries it off. Its shrewd producer, Simon Channing-Williams, had the inspired idea of hiring the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles to direct, and Meirelles has brought to this conspiracy-thriller-cum-love-story the unceasing energy and attack that characterised his sensational debut film City of God.
There is certainly none of the torpid melancholy and disillusion that tend to creep into screen versions of Le Carré - a reflex, perhaps, of his status as the most literary of spy novelists, whose works are sometimes thought of with a kind of Brideshead oboe playing regretfully somewhere in the background. Instead, Meirelles gives us something gutsier and less English. We get rage, restless curiosity, agonised self-reproach and whole landscapes lit up with lightning flashes of paranoia. The performances from Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are excellent, perhaps the very best of their careers, and there is first-rate support, particularly from Bill Nighy as the Mephistophelean mandarin from the Foreign Office.
The Constant Gardener is a love story told in retrospect. Fiennes is Justin, a shy, introspective junior diplomat who falls in love with Tess (Weisz), a beautiful and fiery political activist. They marry and during a difficult posting to Kenya, Justin is informed that Tess has been killed while on her fact-finding trip into remote territory with an aid worker. He will not rest until he finds the truth about Tess's murder, which turns out to be a queasy conspiracy involving the exploitation of HIV-positive Africans, going up to the top of the British establishment. More importantly perhaps even than this, Justin uncovers painful secrets about his marriage, involving a messy and very human renegotiation of friendship with his colleague Sandy: another very good performance from Danny Huston, though perhaps a little hobbled by having to do an English accent. These disclosures result in his growing to admire his late wife even more passionately than before, as someone with humanity and idealism that, though flawed, exceeded his own. Posthumously, he falls in love with her again: his grief is transformed and charged with a visionary insight into Tess's real life.
The film is about betrayal, personal and political, but it provides a new perspective on EM Forster's remark about whether to betray one's friend or one's country. This is about being betrayed by one's country and one's friend; the two types of treason are conflated, and Justin finds himself in the midst of a Greeneian purgatory as he finds out more and more about what has been happening behind his back. The spiritual agony is compounded when Justin's detective work takes him to Germany and then to London, where Bill Nighy's sinister mandarin takes him to luncheon at his St James's Club. The Brazilian Meirelles is clearly a stranger to this habitat and his anthropological detachment enables him to bring out the essential strangeness and concealed brutality of its rituals.
There is a terrific pulse of energy in this film, a voltage which drives it over two hours. It is not just an intricate, despairing meditation on the shabby compromises involved in maintaining Britain's interests and waning foreign prestige. There is real anger here, and a real sense that it is worthwhile striking back against wrongdoing. Its global sweep is exhilarating and boldly cinematic, while also pointing up Justin's desolate loneliness. The Constant Gardener is a romance that packs a punch to equal The English Patient of 20 years ago.
There is certainly none of the torpid melancholy and disillusion that tend to creep into screen versions of Le Carré - a reflex, perhaps, of his status as the most literary of spy novelists, whose works are sometimes thought of with a kind of Brideshead oboe playing regretfully somewhere in the background. Instead, Meirelles gives us something gutsier and less English. We get rage, restless curiosity, agonised self-reproach and whole landscapes lit up with lightning flashes of paranoia. The performances from Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are excellent, perhaps the very best of their careers, and there is first-rate support, particularly from Bill Nighy as the Mephistophelean mandarin from the Foreign Office.
The Constant Gardener is a love story told in retrospect. Fiennes is Justin, a shy, introspective junior diplomat who falls in love with Tess (Weisz), a beautiful and fiery political activist. They marry and during a difficult posting to Kenya, Justin is informed that Tess has been killed while on her fact-finding trip into remote territory with an aid worker. He will not rest until he finds the truth about Tess's murder, which turns out to be a queasy conspiracy involving the exploitation of HIV-positive Africans, going up to the top of the British establishment. More importantly perhaps even than this, Justin uncovers painful secrets about his marriage, involving a messy and very human renegotiation of friendship with his colleague Sandy: another very good performance from Danny Huston, though perhaps a little hobbled by having to do an English accent. These disclosures result in his growing to admire his late wife even more passionately than before, as someone with humanity and idealism that, though flawed, exceeded his own. Posthumously, he falls in love with her again: his grief is transformed and charged with a visionary insight into Tess's real life.
The film is about betrayal, personal and political, but it provides a new perspective on EM Forster's remark about whether to betray one's friend or one's country. This is about being betrayed by one's country and one's friend; the two types of treason are conflated, and Justin finds himself in the midst of a Greeneian purgatory as he finds out more and more about what has been happening behind his back. The spiritual agony is compounded when Justin's detective work takes him to Germany and then to London, where Bill Nighy's sinister mandarin takes him to luncheon at his St James's Club. The Brazilian Meirelles is clearly a stranger to this habitat and his anthropological detachment enables him to bring out the essential strangeness and concealed brutality of its rituals.
There is a terrific pulse of energy in this film, a voltage which drives it over two hours. It is not just an intricate, despairing meditation on the shabby compromises involved in maintaining Britain's interests and waning foreign prestige. There is real anger here, and a real sense that it is worthwhile striking back against wrongdoing. Its global sweep is exhilarating and boldly cinematic, while also pointing up Justin's desolate loneliness. The Constant Gardener is a romance that packs a punch to equal The English Patient of 20 years ago.
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