'The Constant Gardener': Love amid the chase scenes
By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman
Political thrillers often revolve around weighty issues and find time for romantic subplots. Typically, these elements are mostly decor, making a picture's real focus — its plot twists, double-crosses and chase scenes — look more interesting than they might be otherwise.
One of the most remarkable things about "The Constant Gardener," then, is that it finds so much substance behind the decoration: You could walk out of the theater feeling you had seen a wrenching love story instead of a John Le Carre yarn; you might even have a slightly more complicated attitude toward Third World poverty, an issue filmmaker Fernando Meirelles takes seriously (his last film, the stunning "City of God," dealt with it as well) but rarely gets preachy about.
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The love story in question is between Justin (Ralph Fiennes) and Tessa (Rachel Weisz), and in some ways it only truly blooms once husband and wife are parted by death: Tessa is killed at the film's beginning, leaving Justin to grieve, solve the murder and, most importantly, try to understand a woman he only thought he knew.
Tessa had hidden a good deal from her husband because her life's work — a muckraking kind of do-gooderism that involves exposing uncomfortable truths about the West's intervention in Kenya's health crisis — is at odds with his role as a British diplomat. At state dinners, he's on one side of the room hob-nobbing while she works the other, asking awkward questions of people who lie for a living.
It's clear before long that Tessa was killed by powerful people fearing some kind of exposure. Learning who and why requires Justin to try on his wife's shoes, becoming one part detective and one part social activist. His determination doesn't falter when he uncovers clues that his wife had a lover; in long, lyrical flashbacks, we see the unconventional beginnings of their relationship and come to understand how Justin feels — whether she has had an affair or not, he was unable to protect her, and finishing her work is the only way to demonstrate his faithfulness.
Fortunately for the film's commercial prospects, finishing Tessa's work proves to be a tense, intrigue-filled enterprise. Meirelles and his editor know exactly when a burst of quick-cut movement will have the most impact, raising the adrenaline without making this very adult film feel like an action movie — so much so that the most overtly violent sequence here, in which a small village is raided by bandits, almost doesn't belong.
That scene is important, though, for forcing Justin into a confrontation that confirms how fully he has embraced his wife's mission. After a career spent exercising a government-style approach to aid — slow, prudent, willing to help so long as it doesn't mean giving too much — he sees with Tessa's eyes, in which the fate of the person in front of you is never outweighed by foreign policy abstractions.
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