"Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not."
-- Roger Ebert , Chicago Sun-Times
In a remote area of Northern Kenya, activist Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) is found brutally murdered. Tessa's companion, a doctor, appears to have fled the scene, and the evidence points to a crime of passion. Members of the British High Commission in Nairobi assume that
Tessa's widower, their mild-mannered and unambitious colleague Justin Quayle (Ralph
Fiennes), will leave the matter to them. However, haunted by remorse and jarred by rumours of his late wife's infidelities, Quayle surprises everyone by embarking on a personal odyssey which crosses three continents. Using his privileged access to diplomatic secrets, he risks his own life to uncover and expose the truth - a conspiracy more far-reaching and deadly than
Quayle could ever have imagined.
Book
The Constant Gardener is plotheavy in the classic Le Carré mould. It is also an unabashedly political novel. And the ''pharmas,'' as the drug giants are called, are merely the most specific of numerous targets on Le Carré's list. Indeed, these corporations take the rap for obeisance to ''the profit god,'' the ''self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and poverty,'' ''the inhumanity of self-styled humanitarians who are ripping off the poorest nations,'' and much more. You could legitimately call Le Carré's true subject here the whole of the post-cold-war order--globalism, in a word. […]Through Justin [Quayle], the political themes are elevated to questions of loyalty, integrity, and personal sovereignty in a world that rewards betrayal, venality, and the abdication of moral responsibility. […] It's eye-opening, to say the least, to find a novelist of Le
Carré's intelligence and stature writing so bluntly about the many questions facing our globalized world. […] We are all Justin Quayle, Le Carré seems to suggest. We are each enmeshed in moral dilemmas--our age seems to have more than its share--and we have a duty to resolve them, whether we accept that responsibility or not.
( http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_52/b3713106.htm
)
Film
In the sense that the plight of the African people comes second to Justin's schematic anarchist awakening and the story's rote spy-game shenanigans, Constant Gardener is rather turgid and misguided for something that's supposed to inspire self-righteous anger. Though not as preposterously enraged as The Interpreter , the film still chooses to fan the flames of
PROGRAMME NOTES:
The Constant Gardener (Directed by Fernando Meirelles, 2005)

liberal guilt from a safe distance. Ooga-booga Africa is brought to the United Nations building in New York City in The Interpreter . In Constant Gardener , the whites go to Africa, but they scarcely approach their black hosts. Meirelles applies a coat of City of God primer to the
Kenyan landscape (sweaty, cotton-candied colors that bring to mind fashion magazine spreads of exotic locales and pulsating tribal beats to exaggerate the sense of danger); children stare into the camera, giving audiences the impression they're taking a wild safari ride through an African pastoral and throwing alms at the captive masses.
In this way, the film is wildly condescending, and if it hardly registers as a socially-conscious indictment of dehumanizing corporate abuses, it's because Meirelles is concerned with the story's "romantic thriller" elements first, exaggerated controversies second. It's easy-breezy, pretzeled syntax isn't even daring, existing only to augment Justin's sense of emotional loss:
Goaded at every turn by preachy maxims ("No drug company does anything for free" and
"This whole machine is driven by guilt"), he's not fighting for anyone but himself, following a trail of breadcrumbs straight to the cross. By the time we see the same shampoo-commercial sex scene he shares with Tessa for a second time, it becomes abundantly clear that Meirelles regards white interests as highly as the drug companies.
(http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1686)
After filming, the Constant Gardener Trust was set-up to help the inhabitants of the slums near Nairobi where the crew had been filming.
After City of God (2002), Fernando Meirelles said in a Guardian interview that he had turned down all Hollywood's offers to pursue a personal project which had been guaranteed funding.
Like City of God the film would be about exclusion, but on an international scale. He said,
'People say that Brazil is a very unjust place. But there is no country in the world that is as unjust as the world taken as a whole.' It would seem, however, that the lure of Hollywood proved too strong; apart from a Brazilian TV series based on City of God , this proved to be his next feature film, albeit one still rooted in injustice. http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,855898,00.html
The Constant Gardner sheds light on the dark side of Corporate Socially Irresponsible
Behaviour in the drug industry thanks to its thriller construction. By stressing the role of diplomats in the maintenance of the development of these irresponsible behaviours, the movie also puts the emphasis on some key aspects of the global context in which MNCs operate today: their relationships with governments, the problem of their governance when they act in developing countries... Finally, by depicting a character questioning his own ethics, the Constant Gardner contributes to the understanding of ethical decision making in its more subjective form, through the hero quest of the truth.
 City of God/Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
 Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org
)
 Big Pharma, Bad Science, Nathan Newman http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman20020725
PROGRAMME NOTES:
The Constant Gardener (Directed by Fernando Meirelles, 2005)