The Constant -- not Chauncey -- Gardener

reviewed Sat, 03 Sep 2005

Hey, here’s a news flash:  big pharmaceutical companies take advantage of poor, uneducated people, and some African government officials are corrupt.  If this amazes you, you will be floored by The Constant Gardener, an adaptation of the John Le Carré novel, directed, in a welcome departure from the usual stable of thriller directors, by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City of God).

Ralph Fiennes is very good in his quiet, slow-to-boil way as the hobbyist gardener of the title, the consummate diplomat who glides through his job without really feeling the impact of the policy and political world he inhabits until he meets passionate activist Rachel Weisz.  She’s what he’s not – and, you sense, what he sort of wants to be.  What she sees in him is less clear (the plot dictates that she be made to seem like a heartless manipulator using him for his access to inner circles, which pissed me off hugely – it does such a disservice to the character).  Meirelles makes good use of the colorful Kenyan locales, although at times it feels like a travelogue.

Frankly, I found the evil-pharma plot tiresome and distracting (please – if you think Big Pharma is testing drugs in African slums out of altruism, I’d like to know what planet you’ve been living on, because it must be better than this one).  I was more interested in the love story between Fiennes and Weisz; despite their differences, they have wonderful chemistry, and Fiennes is so convincingly besotted that the relationship became more important to me than the corporate evildoings.

The Constant Gardener is meant to shake us all out of our day-to-day complacency – you can’t help everyone in need, but sometimes you have the chance to help one person – and you shouldn’t let your despair or jadedness stop you from doing something.  Like Amnesty International used to say, “It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”*  There are times when I feel like I’m right out of candles.

*Here’s an unrelated rant:  I Googled this phrase to try to find its origin and instead discovered a slew of religious websites that claimed Jesus said it.  Uh, no, actually it was a Chinese proverb.  This is just another example of the creepy attempt by Christians to put their stamp on everything, or rather, their creepy, deep-rooted conviction that everything is theirs.  Tangentially related to this rant is a good Bill McKibben piece on how Americans’ brand of Christianity bears only a passing resemblance to the real thing (I thought of that article because he says in it that some ridiculous percentage of Christians believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is in the Bible – actually, Ben Franklin said it).

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