Garden(er) of Cinematic Delights

Fernando Meirelles' new film, The Constant Gardener, is about watching and being watched. The previews may fool you into thinking it's a movie about scandals involving the pharmaceutical industry in Kenya, or about a multinational murder mystery, or a love affair starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, or the exploitation of African poverty by a collusion of powerful government and corporate forces. And Meirelles, working from a screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, adapted from a John le Carré novel, turns his attention to each of these plot threads. But in the end, Gardener remains always a study on who gets to watch, whom is watched, and what happens when someone tries to escape, or even reverse, the terms of their surveillance. It is always about watching.

It is therefore fortunate that the movie is such a pleasure to look at. Meirelles, who last directed the Brazilian crime epic City of God, fills the screen with blazing colors: brilliant blue skies, scorching red deserts, lush green foliage and the pastel riot of buildings in the rural Kenyan villages Tessa (Weisz) visits. Indeed, the brusque energy and bright visual sense of the Kenya sequences may be familiar from City of God's Rio de Janeiro favelas. So much so, that when the story sends Fiennes to London, it is jarring to see the uniform and steely gray that hangs over the sky, streets, buildings and people.

The film’s strengths do not end with its assured visual style. We also get two strong lead performances working their way through a satisfyingly twisty plot. We begin with Justin (Fiennes), a mid-level British diplomat in Kenya, learning that his wife, the crusading activist Tessa, has been murdered. The rest of the film, cutting between flashbacks and the present day, traces Justin and Tessa's initial courtship, and then their parallel investigations: Justin in the present trying to make sense of his wife's death, and his wife in the past trying to uncover what exactly a drug company is demanding from the destitute Kenyans to whom it donates AIDS treatments.

Fiennes starts to investigate the drug company and learn what his wife uncovered and as he does, he comes to realize that he is being watched in the same way his wife was, and that the people watching do not like being looked at themselves. The modes of observation can vary: in Kenya it means being picked up by corrupt local cops and harassed. In London it means the video cameras that seem to sit like vultures on every ledge and lightpole. In the end, for everyone who looks too deep, it means being followed by men with guns. For the protagonists, looking back means trying to find witnesses, corresponding with allies through the internet, and trying to find the pattern amid all the misery that piles up around them. Watching both sides trying to track one another while covering their own tracks offers rewards both visceral and cerebral. Meirelles expertly turns up the tension, and provides plenty of nail-biting set pieces within a larger story dominated by melancholy as much as by righteous anger.

Though her screen time is relatively limited, Rachel Weisz serves as the heart of the movie, and perhaps its conscience as well. Weisz ably portrays Tessa as both charismatic and irritating, idealistic and chillingly pragmatic. It is quite a balancing act, to evoke the kind of person whose noble intentions inspire admiration even as she provokes frustration with her stubbornness and tactlessness. Like all the performers, she plays a character with complex motivations and ambiguous ethics. And among the enormous talent assembled onscreen (Fiennes, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Danny Huston, Hubert Kounde and others) Weisz truly stands out. She gives one of the most layered and complex performances of the year without making a big show of it, and if we live in a just world, it should elevate her to the top rank of working actresses. Unfortunately, based on the evidence The Constant Gardener gives us, it's not a very just world. Go and look for yourself.