Andy-296 Review of The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Disapppointing, smug view of Africa by do-good westerners

[1/10 · 21 December 2006]

One of 2005 most disappointing films. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles had made before the great gangster film "Cidade do Deus" about the brutal life in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. So expectations were high for his second film. Alas, he choose as its material a recent novel by John Le Carre, an exciting writer of spy novels in the 60s and 70s, but someone who has since the 90s been very disappointing in his work, turning the moral ambiguity of his earlier books into shrill indictments of the West in his later ones (not that he does not have a few points here and there in those books). So, from this unpromising material, Meirelles has made a truly awful movie. Basically, the plot is about a timid British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) trying to solve the murder of his activist wife in Kenya (Rachel Weisz, playing an insufferably smug individual). Fiennes character eventually finds that she was on the track of evil western pharmaceutical companies testing new drugs on African patients without obtaining their fully informed consent - not Africa's most pressing issue. What is most disturbing about this movie, though, is that Africans are basically used as props, useful for the filmmakers to show their superior moral status over other whites. Africans are at most exotic objects here, not subjects of their own lives. You never get to hear their own voices in this film.