The Constant Gardener (*** ½ - DVD)
This is a British film about an English Diplomat and his new wife. It shows us how they meet and how they die, and how they tried to shake the monkey tree.
Tessa (Rachel Weicz, nominee for Best Supporting Actress) plays a very out-spoken and charming woman who meets and marries Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a diplomat for England to Kenya. They meet in a whirlwind romance and she asks him to take her to Africa with him.
All this is done in flashbacks after Justin finds out about Rachel’s death. During the flashbacks he suspects that Rachel is having an affair with her constant companion, a black man, Dr. Joshua Ngaba (John Sibi-Okumu). Tessa was constantly roaming the country of Kenya and had suspected that something was wrong with the UN-supported drug distribution for AIDS. She doggedly keeps searching for answers, even while she is eight months pregnant.
As Justin investigates Tessa’s death he also learns that Dr. Ngaba was gay and that Tessa did love him, as he loved her. Eventually, Justin finds the same evidence that Tessa uncovered. Her death was apparently done by the drug companies using poor black people to test a new cure for the ‘Super Tuberculosis’ that is starting to sweep the world.
So we have rich industrialists in cahoots with sympathetic government officials and the poor and destitute stuck in the middle. Not a new idea, but this is an interesting story.
What makes this work is the love affair between Justin and Tessa. She is a spunky and vocal woman who never misses a chance to take a jab at any assumed evil-doer, while he is a stoic and calm civil servant who passes his time caring for his plants. It is an interesting pairing, but the scenes of them together are touching and convincing.
I give this film 3 ½ stars (out of five). I liked it more than I thought I would at the beginning of the film. It is well edited, but the some of the dialog is so muted, I kept having to adjust the volume. Although the majesty of Central Africa was probably better seen on the big screen, it was not central to the story.
As for nominating Rachel Weicz for supporting actress instead of Best Actress, yes, I can go with that. The main story is around the husband, and although Tessa gets an appreciable amount of screen time, she is not the central character.
This film also got nominated for Best Screenplay Adaptation. For a who-dunnit movie, I have heard better dialog, and many of the conversations seemed stilted, so it would not get my vote.
Sorry, no surprise endings here (worth mentioning).
Tessa (Rachel Weicz, nominee for Best Supporting Actress) plays a very out-spoken and charming woman who meets and marries Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a diplomat for England to Kenya. They meet in a whirlwind romance and she asks him to take her to Africa with him.
All this is done in flashbacks after Justin finds out about Rachel’s death. During the flashbacks he suspects that Rachel is having an affair with her constant companion, a black man, Dr. Joshua Ngaba (John Sibi-Okumu). Tessa was constantly roaming the country of Kenya and had suspected that something was wrong with the UN-supported drug distribution for AIDS. She doggedly keeps searching for answers, even while she is eight months pregnant.
As Justin investigates Tessa’s death he also learns that Dr. Ngaba was gay and that Tessa did love him, as he loved her. Eventually, Justin finds the same evidence that Tessa uncovered. Her death was apparently done by the drug companies using poor black people to test a new cure for the ‘Super Tuberculosis’ that is starting to sweep the world.
So we have rich industrialists in cahoots with sympathetic government officials and the poor and destitute stuck in the middle. Not a new idea, but this is an interesting story.
What makes this work is the love affair between Justin and Tessa. She is a spunky and vocal woman who never misses a chance to take a jab at any assumed evil-doer, while he is a stoic and calm civil servant who passes his time caring for his plants. It is an interesting pairing, but the scenes of them together are touching and convincing.
I give this film 3 ½ stars (out of five). I liked it more than I thought I would at the beginning of the film. It is well edited, but the some of the dialog is so muted, I kept having to adjust the volume. Although the majesty of Central Africa was probably better seen on the big screen, it was not central to the story.
As for nominating Rachel Weicz for supporting actress instead of Best Actress, yes, I can go with that. The main story is around the husband, and although Tessa gets an appreciable amount of screen time, she is not the central character.
This film also got nominated for Best Screenplay Adaptation. For a who-dunnit movie, I have heard better dialog, and many of the conversations seemed stilted, so it would not get my vote.
Sorry, no surprise endings here (worth mentioning).
posted by Mr. Don at
12:22 PM
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