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The Long Thumbs Up: Questioning the Critique in Response to "The Constant Gardener"

18 September 2005

Fernando Meirelles’ new film "The Constant Gardener" is a towering achievement. The screenplay is transposed from John Le Carre’s best-selling novel into an extraordinarily precise thriller with extraordinary parts all around. The cinematography is brilliant – both in its visuals and its affect on the film’s narrative, namely its use of the handheld camera to heighten the sense of immediacy; in fact, "The Constant Gardener" has the most effective and committed use of handheld camera work in recent memory. The film’s editing is magnificent, its use of colors superb, and its ability to hold suspense remarkable. Oh, and Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are good too.

Here endeth the review.

"The Constant Gardener" is one of a handful of – for lack of any term by which to suitably categorize them – Issues films. "Hotel Rwanda" and "Schindler’s List" are two others. Films interrogatory and shattering. Films beautiful and alarming. Films which leave the theater with the audience, to slip out in conversations for days and weeks and even months afterward... once attendees dispense with the long, silent car rides home, the kind of rides these films tend to evoke.

These three particular films are well-crafted, well-acted, well-made. But what do questions of technique matter when the story is so powerful it eclipses the means by which it was told?

Meirelles’ film concerns a British diplomat (Fiennes) struggling to find the truth behind his wife’s controversial work against pharmaceutical companies. It depicts the disadvantaged, dead, and dying of Africa beside corruptions among the West’s major power brokers which seem almost too appropriate to be untrue, and it is staggeringly effective, for all the reasons of technique above. In one scene, for instance, after Fiennes’ prodding Justin Quayle has been beaten as a warning to stop prodding, the perspective of his attackers’ exit is from the floor, sideways – i.e. Quayle’s point of view as he lies on the ground bleeding. From this low angle, the attackers are revealed to have a soccer ball, a signifier that relates to a moment earlier in the film. The image – dark, with a red carpet taking up half of the screen while the men appear as silhouettes – is a simple touch to put the audience literally in the eyes of the protagonist, but it is spot on for creating sympathy.

But even in this light, do I say "The Constant Gardener" is good? Of course it is good – it is very well made – but one is hardly human if he/she walks out the theater after "The Constant Gardener" having "enjoyed" it on the narrative level: the film is a heartbreaking tale of deception and death. On the artistic level it is exceptional. Between the two, the narrative dominates, so it becomes one of those films that is great to see but impossible to watch... like "Hotel Rwanda"... like "Schindler’s List." Does that make it good?

To put it another way, how does one even begin to review a film like "The Constant Gardener?" My glowing review in paragraph one stands, but were I to be writing a critique to be published in a daily newspaper, I would not dream of writing it that way. My working assumption concerning the job of the newspaper film critic is that he/she is not supposed to answer the reader’s question, "Is the film good," but rather, the question, "Should I go see this movie?" So, "a towering achievement" is helpful, but the rest of paragraph was not.

After all, my instincts coming out of the theater were not to describe how beautiful "Gardener" was shot, or how well it was edited and written; those were later concerns that, now that I think of them, I hope the movie gets recognized for. Instead, I was thinking, "How horrible, how could these things happen." In short, I thought about the story itself, not the storytelling.

That second question of "should I go" cannot, thereby, be answered with praises of "The Constant Gardener"s cinematography or acting. At least by me. Lisa Schwarzbaum, critic for Entertainment Magazine, wrote in her review, "the chemistry between Fiennes and Weisz... feels playfully sexy" (who sees a movie about mistreatment of an epidemic and thinks, at any moment, of the word ‘sexy’?). Those praises should come down the road.

I could start with the problems I found in the film, but the only real problem with "Gardener" that is not justified in its telling is how it is being advertised. It has a very good trailer, but its poster's tag line is "Love. At Any Cost." One begins to wonder if Justin Quayle’s story is for love, or rather for some emotion closer to vindication, reconciliation, or a need for penance. "The Constant Gardener" is not, I feel safe in saying, a love story.

"Gardener" is, however, a tough, intense film that investigates hard questions, perhaps to the point of over-reaching, but certainly in a way artful, beautiful, inspired, and worthwhile. It met one of my seldom-met criterions, which send a film soaring up my quality meter – I asked, "How’d they do that?" – and it succeeded in the first rule of good cinema: story. And though its theme is at times hard to take, it is equally hard to forget. In short, I hope everyone will see it.

That would be my newspaper review. In fewer words, "Yes, go see it." Such is the problem of print: not enough space to include all one's thoughts: "Yes, go see it. Oh, and the film making is REALLY good too."

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Photo Caption: The Eyes of Voldemort. Ralph Fiennes as the beleaguered Justin Quayle in Fernando Meirelles' "The Constant Gardener." From the Focus Features Trailer.

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