9-06-05, 9:07 am

Human rights activist Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) has been found murdered. Her car was discovered overturned in a lakebed in Northern Kenya. A Kenyan doctor by the name of Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), who had been traveling with Tessa, has disappeared. Arnold and Tessa have secrets. The British government would like to convince Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), Tessa’s new husband and a low-level British diplomat in Nairobi, Kenya, that these secrets have to do with a sexual relationship, and that he should leave it at that. The Constant Gardener is an edge-of-your-seat political thriller that keeps you wondering until the very end.

Justin Quayle is a lot like many people who live in the West. Detached and wearing blinders, Quayle prefers to spend his free time in his garden. He regards his work for the British High Commission in Western Africa not as a cog in the remnant machinery of British neo-colonialism, but simply as a neutral party representing the wishes of the British government. In fact, his first meeting with Tessa occurs at a lecture he gives during which she vocally challenges the British government’s right to side with the US and aid in the war on Iraq. Tessa criticizes the claim that diplomats in Britain or the US tried to avoid the war. They, in fact, pushed the situation to a crisis from which politicians could claim the war was justified. While Justin personally agrees with her, he excuses his complicity with the remark that he is merely a diplomat who cannot be held responsible for the decisions of the government.

Until her death, in addition to not allowing partisanship or personal responsibility infuse his work, Justin also consciously avoids trying to know anything specific about Tessa’s work. When his superiors warn him that she might be embarrassing the High Commission by sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, Justin refuses to take this advice seriously and chalks up embarrassing situations to Tessa’s blunt personality and left-wing politics.

His wife’s sudden death at the hands of persons unknown shakes him out of this state of blissful ignorance and forces him to search for the truth and to find and hold those who murdered his wife responsible. To save her memory, he finds himself compelled to finish her work. He is no longer a neutral player above the fray of politics and the intrigues of big business. He is neck deep in it and may not survive to tell his tale.

Directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, the co-director of City of God, this adaptation (screenplay by Jeffrey Caine) of John LeCarré’s intelligent political thriller novel of the same name, mixes a deeply personal love story marred by treacherous secrets and the hints of a cover-up by a multinational pharmaceutical corporation testing its drugs on the sick in Nairobi’s over-populated slums.

In the end, the story winds from the streets of Nairobi, elite London clubs to secluded villages in Southern Sudan. It raises the issue of the AIDS crisis in Africa as well as the spread of other infectious diseases on that continent. It brings to the foreground the question of disease and treatment as a source of profit for the pharmaceutical companies that regard human life not as precious in itself but as a vehicle for new and expensive drugs that will make their stockholders rich. Politicians, CEOs, and their thugs are willing to use lives for profit, political gains, or the big payoff. Control over markets is worth killing for. The film links this to the genocide in Sudan and notes that the violence that occurs in some African countries is tied directly to the wealth and power of many Western countries like the US and Britain. It strongly hints that while colonialism has formally disappeared, the imperialist countries continue to wield power in order to protect the interests of the multinational corporations that manipulate the politicians of their countries.

But the story is also deeply connected to the health care crisis in the US. A recent report by the Census Bureau shows that nearly 46 million people are without health care coverage and that millions more who have some coverage really cannot afford the skyrocketing double-digit inflation of prescription drugs. Here, too, health has become a precious commodity bought and sold by the same companies that pry profits out of death and misery in Africa. Our struggle for a just health care system is not unrelated to atrocities committed in Africa, fueled by the profit motive and legitimized by 'free market' ideology.

This gem of a film deserves a wider viewing. It is a brilliant effort on many levels and is powerfully written and superbly acted. It dramatizes the true agenda of the large pharmaceutical companies. It blows the lid off the biggest open secret of the 21st century: tens of millions of people are dying in Africa of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, starvation, mass murder and other atrocities to push up the stock price of a few multinational pharmaceutical companies a few ticks higher. God bless capitalism.



--Contact Clara West at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.