Saw The Constant Gardener yesterday for my Monday matinee. Having forgotten to wear my watch, I checked the time on my cell phone around an hour into it and every ten minutes thereafter. I was bored and anxious for its anticlimactic denoument to come so I could go.
The exhaustion of my patience with the film coincided with the end of the jump in time segments, which ultimately I found very arbitrary and therefore tedious -- just as the director settled into telling the story it was too late. I suppose the jumps in time were thought necessary to fill in all the backstory. I may have known it was adapted from a John LeCarre novel prior to seeing it, I'm not certain. I did say to myself while watching it, Oh this story is intriguing, but I'd rather read about it in a john LeCarre novel. (If I ever read those types of books.) I just didn't find the backstory all that necessary. The wife of a quiet, well-peered diplomat is very active politically. She spends a lot of time with a native Kenyan doctor helping the poor. A pharmacuetical company is up to no good with the help of the British government. Shadow agents eliminate the bleeding heart wife when she gets too active in her discovery of evil doing.
That's a good set-up. I don't need to know she has always asked too many questions going back to meeting her husband at university. I can see that in the way she handles herself with the poor, the Kenyan doctor, her husband and at a diplomatic social function. I don't need to see them fall in love in a flashback. I'm not so cynical as to believe they might well have been in love to have gotten married in the first place. For all the the first hour's attention to backstory, it makes the sudden introduction of the wealthy cousin in the third act feel more like movieland than reality. Though I liked the jump in time juxtaposition of his eulogy and the gardener's final earthly moments.
For a film that does a good turn in showing the shanty towns and the suffering of the African poor as well as offering some truthful though often, dare I say, too understated performances, it shrinks from allowing reality to unfold before us with any patience. Think of the power of the long take in such dire living conditions. The fast cutting really worked in the director's film, City of God, precisely because the world it was depicting depended on fleet-footed survival. We were given the chance to sneak a peek into a world that doesn't allow Peeping Toms.
A note on the preformances: Rachel Weisz was great. She had conviction and compassion and showed great courage. All of the supporting roles were well played, though F. Murray Abraham suffered a sliding dialect and the manner in which the Kenyan doctor's eyes lighted on the heroine was exactly that -- mannered. I found Ralph Fiennes far too understated. He hit some wonderful notes of realization that reflected his inner life and his character's temperment and class at key moments. However, if the film hoped to show a man awaken to a less distanced relationship to the world, I think the actor failed. Though he may have failed, he is not to blame. As always the buck stops with he or she at the helm. In this case, the director didn't give his leading man and his audience a chance to watch the gardener's garden grow.
All that said, I appreciate that the film was about human beings. Unfotunately, the view of humanity was obfuscated by frantic cuts, desaturated images and too much backstory and exposition. I never groaned, I just got a little bored at times as the story went in one eye and out the other all too self-conciously.
I predict Phil Hoffman will be accepting a gold statuette from the Academy next Spring based on the trailer for Capote. Wow.
Pasta and Bagels,
Signore Direttore
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