A Continent for the Taking

The Constant Gardener is so substantial, engaged, emotionally nuanced and lovingly crafted that I feel in danger of criticizing it to death. Unfair comparisons with other movies spring to mind, arguments against the narrative conventions, objections to the style, none of which I would have raised against a lesser film. I blame the screenwriter, Jeffrey Caine, and the director, Fernando Meirelles (City of God), and even John le Carré, who wrote the novel that inspired the picture. So effectively have they addressed their subject--the everyday, business-as-usual destruction of Africa's people--that I struggle to forgive them for having made only a movie.

At the heart of this political story, and so of the critical difficulties, lies a human problem: Can meek, decent British diplomat Justin Quayle dare to believe that his wife, Tessa, loves him? Or, to restate the problem in more immediate terms, can movie star Ralph Fiennes believe that movie star Rachel Weisz loves him? The second question, by answering itself, helps to decide the first, for good and bad alike.

On the good side, Weisz has what is easily her best screen role to date, in which she gets to overwhelm her every scene with flooding speech and bursting flesh. "You're quite scary," Fiennes says to her at their first encounter, in a tone pitched precisely between flirtation and candor. To her raging river, he plays the obliging bank; and for that, Weisz's Tessa cherishes him. She will even try to protect Justin by diverting the torrent from him, sometimes.

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