dir. Fernando Meirelles
Putting the pesky matter of writing talent aside for the moment, what differentiates John le Carré from other brand-name, beach-read suspense novelists such as Robert Ludlum is his witty, veddy British sense of control. No matter what the stakes, his protagonists carry on about their shady below-the-radar business with overcoats firmly buckled. Reserved, however, is just about the last term you'd ever associate with Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, whose gangland calling card City of God exploded off the screen with a startling energy. Such kinetic exuberance opened up charges of showoffy indulgence: all Scorsese-aping style, no substance.
Given the evidence, The Constant Gardener (Meirelles's adaptation of le Carré's 1991 doorstop-sized bestseller) really shouldn't work. That it does comes as one of the year's best surprises: Its combination of outsized spectacle and small character beats proves irresistible. The odd-couple melding isn't without a crack or two. The director's intensely passionate style can be overly ruthless with the author's escalating, chock-full-of-subplots narrative spiral; more worryingly, his hellbent-for-leather immediacy occasionally blisses out to an unseemly degree on the third-world spectacle. Still, at the film's (considerable) best, the contrasting styles of the novelist and the director dovetail beautifully.
Heavily reworked by the Meirelles, Jeffery Caine's stripped-down screenplay retains le Carré's basic thrust: following the disappearance of his activist wife (Rachel Weisz), a middle-rung foreign ambassador (Ralph Fiennes) goes proactive on a global scale, uncovering all sorts of corporate malfeasance before eventually zeroing in on illegal drug testing in the slums of Kenya. Whereas the novel focuses more on the corporate cloak and dagger, however, Meirelles's telling stages as much as possible against the dazzling African backdrop. Working with his hellaciously talented City of God cinematographer Cesar Charlone, he makes the bustling landscape a character to be reckoned with, with a hand-held vitality that rivals the best of Michael Mann. The intense emotional buzz throughout should put the claim of the director's merely technical talent to rest. True, he often appears to think mostly with his eyes, and has a sometimes frustrating reluctance to stage a simple shot. Unlike most whiz-bang video kids, however, his interest in character goes beyond the merely decorative. As in the best adaptations, there's a sense that The Constant Gardner is hijacking the source material in order to feed the filmmaker's personal obsessions. By the final, deliriously heartsick frames, the motivations of writer and director seem miraculously in synch.
Ultimately, what helps bridges the gap between their creative bents are the actors. Fiennes has been down this outwardly reserved, inwardly crumbling road before, but he rings the small changes like a champ, fashioning a tragic hero out of the tiniest of gestures. Appearing mainly in flashback, Weisz is presented with a more formidable challenge. Her character isn't especially likable at first, with a tendency to hold forth that verges uncomfortably on preachy authorial intrusion. Still, with the assistance of the screenplay's chronological jumbling (kudos to ace editor Claire Simpson), Weisz creates a muse whose memory justifies any action.
Meeting the director during his recent stop in Seattle was initially disorienting: How can this slight, polite guy generate such awesome power behind the camera? Once he got cooking though, my doubts fell by the wayside—he quickly proved equally passionate about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking in impoverished areas and the behind-the-scenes humanitarian efforts of cast and crew. During my brief interview, Meirelles was refreshingly honest about initially taking the job on a for-hire basis, without previous knowledge of the novel, during the hiatus of another, more personal African-set film. This disconnect, however small, makes his achievement even more impressive. Diehard fans of the novel may squawk at the liberties Meirelles has taken. Most others should find the film difficult to shake.
