Confronting the Big Pharma Hydra
Fernando Meirelles Lights a Cinematic Fuse to le Carre’s Novel
By Cole Smithey
“The Constant Gardener” is a scathing political thriller filled with terrific ensemble performances, directed by one of cinema’s most innovative filmmakers.
Based on John le Carre’s best-selling 2001 novel of the same name, director Fernando Meirelles (“City Of God”) brings his bold signature docudrama style to bear on a scandalous story of corporate and governmental greed attacking the third world.
Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quale, a British diplomat whose political activist wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is assassinated for her efforts to expose a discovery about a drug being tested on unwitting impoverished Kenyans, many of whom perish as a result. Justin Quale rattles the British corridors of power as he conducts a personal investigation into his wife’s death, and learns not only the horrifying truth behind a vast pharmaceutical conspiracy but also the depth of his love for Tessa.
The film is about an uncompromising woman who fights a corporate political hydra imbedded in every stratum of our global reality. It is also about the limited effect her death has on exposing the atrocities she finds. But it is also a tender love story told in flashbacks, and in the forward momentum, of a man searching for a secret aspect of the woman he loves. The movie takes its audience on a crash course of how the poorest nations are made to pay in blood for the cash-lined coffers of Western politicians and pharmaceutical executives.
The brunt of the film’s narrative weight falls on Ralph Fiennes’s flawless rendering of a midlevel British career diplomat who, because of his naïve openness to the world around him, allows himself to fall in love with a spitfire opposite, in the guise of the earthy Tessa.
Fiennes imperceptibly transforms from a quiet man concerned with maintaining his collection of plants into a ravenous lover of the woman he could hardly comprehend when she was alive. It’s Justin’s love that drives him to doggedly retrace Tessa’s footsteps that led to her murder. His trust in her enables him to see beyond his own political prejudices to discover a horrible conspiracy of deception. Tessa’s passionate concern for the impoverished victims of Big Pharma indirectly shapes Justin’s sense of humanity until he, in effect, becomes an extension of her activism.
After Tessa loses her baby during childbirth in a dank Kenyan hospital, she notices an African woman perishing at the hand of a supposed wonder drug called Dypraxa that has not yet been approved for the Western market, but is being liberally administered to African hospital patients. With the help of her African associate Arnold (Hubert Bluhm) Tessa starts going after the men behind the deception, including those in Justin’s political circle–like the acting head of the High Commission Sandy Woodrow (played to despicable perfection by Danny Huston).
Rachel Weisz completely submerges herself as Tessa and gives the strongest performance of her career. She has an intellectual’s lust for life. Weisz unites Tessa’s hyper-quick mind with a distinctive enthusiasm for all things corporeal.
There’s a specific tempo to her movements and an uncanny ability to spring into action. In the scene where Tessa first meets Justin, he’s giving a low-key public speech before she launches into him with fierce accusations of governmental malfeasance. It’s a tightrope scene where she could easily have slipped into a realm of pretension, but Weisz compartmentalizes Tessa’s boundaries so we see what Justin sees — a strong-willed woman with an immediate need to connect with truth regardless of the cost. It’s a completely opposite precept to that of the pharmaceutical companies who don’t want you to see this movie. If anything, that’s all the more reason to seek out this fine film.
Rated R. 128 mins.
