Jaap Buitendijk/Focus Features
In excellent adaptation of John le Carré's novel, Mr. Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose surname hardly suggests strength or decisiveness. Justin's main qualities seem, at least at first, to be diffidence, his interest in gardening and a fumbling, self-effacing kindness.
His words half swallowed, his features perpetually tinged with guilt, Justin is temperamentally unsuited to being the hero of a globe-trotting political thriller, which is part of why "The Constant Gardener" is an unusually satisfying example of the genre.
Another reason is that, unlike most other recent examples - hectic and empty star vehicle for and comes to mind - Mr. Meirelles's film actually bothers to say something about global politics.
If what it says provokes some indignant rebuttal (be on the lookout for op-ed columns and public relations bulletins challenging its dire view of big pharmaceutical companies), so much the better. In pointedly applying President Bush's phrase "axis of evil" to multinational corporations rather than to rogue states, the movie shows a willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion. This strikes me as noble, but it would also strike me as annoying if Mr.
Meirelles were not such a skilled and subtle filmmaker, and if his cast were not so sensitive and sly.
There is more to the film than a twisting plot and a topical hook, and also more than visual bravura, colorful locations and fine, mostly British, acting. ( is superbly creepy as Justin's two-faced friend and colleague, and the incomparable Bill Nighy shows a knack for soft-spoken villainy that makes you wish for a dozen sequels.
) This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience. Which is only proper, since the theme of the film, as of Mr. le Carré's novel, is the uneasy, divided conscience of the liberal West.
Fittingly enough for a man in his profession, Justin is a creature of moderation and compromise, apparently without strong views of his own. His young wife, Tessa ( ), is another story. They meet at a lecture Justin is giving on British foreign policy, after which Tessa angrily, tearfully challenges Britain's participation in the war in Iraq, as if embodying the caricature of people who hold such views as shrill hysterics.
Her outburst, which clears the room, provokes an oddly sympathetic reaction in Justin - a desire to comfort and protect this furious (and also very pretty) antagonist. For her part, Tessa finds something attractive about his solicitude, and his refusal to take offense. "I feel safe with you," she says after they make love for the first time, and he, without saying as much, clearly feels more alive with her.
But for most of the movie, which is an elegant origami of flashbacks and foreshadowings, Tessa is dead, murdered in the Kenyan wilderness, where she had gone with a Belgian doctor of African ancestry named Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé), who many in the Nairobi expatriate community assumed was her lover. In that cozy, gossipy world, where the habits of colonial rule seem to have adapted themselves easily to the requirements of do-gooder paternalism, Tessa was always something of a scandalous woman, puncturing the hypocritical politesse of cocktail parties with rude questions about money, power, poverty and disease. She preferred to spend her time - usually in the company of Dr.
Bluhm - wandering through slums and villages, where, especially while pregnant, she cut a somewhat self-consciously saintly figure.
One easy criticism of "The Constant Gardener" is that like so many other movies of its kind, it uses the misery of the developing world as an exotic backdrop for a story about the travails of white people. Fair enough, except that it is precisely the moral failures and obligations of the wealthy world that are at issue here.
It is also worth noting that Mr. Meirelles is from Brazil, a country whose social and political landscape may resemble Kenya's more than Britain's. One cannot help but feel that his camera - operated by the exceptionally gifted Uruguayan cinematographer César Charlone - feels more at home in the rusty heat of Africa than in the chilly, gray austerity of Europe.
There is, in his beautiful, crowded frames, a palpable tension between foreground and background, a sense that the real human scale of the story is not to be found in the fates of Justin and Tessa, however affecting these may be.
This is, in other words, a movie acutely aware of its own limitations. Mr.
Meirelles's previous film, a Scorsesean epic of the Rio slums, also tried to embed social concern within the conventions of pop filmmaking. It was a bit of an awkward fit, especially at those moments where the horror of real-world brutality shattered the gangster bravado. This time, constrained by the screenwriter Jeffrey Caine's nimble streamlining of Mr.
le Carré's book, the director manages a more consistent tone, and implies more violence than he shows. There are nonetheless scenes - in particular a rebel raid on a refugee camp in Sudan - whose sheer cinematic intensity makes them more dazzling than appalling.
But that is always the risk of making entertainment out of the world's trouble, an undertaking that is nonetheless worthwhile and that few have pursued as long or as well as Mr.
le Carré. The world has changed since the end of the cold war, which was his great subject, and "The Constant Gardener" can stand as an example of how thriller-making has become more difficult. Mr.
le Carré's novels of East-West espionage were exercises in speculative realism; it was always possible to imagine that something like the chess games between Smiley and Karla were really going on behind the scenes. It is harder to take literally what happens in this film. The premise is that the profiteering impulses of global capitalism (thuggishly embodied by Gerard McSorley's drug-company executive) are enabled by the diplomacy and trade policy of Western governments.
This seems quite plausible. Less so is the idea that this collusion is propelled by conspiracy, skulduggery and murder. Given the power of the villains and the weakness of the victims, it would hardly need to be.
So it may be best to take the cloak-and-dagger elements of "The Constant Gardener," and the vision of justice with which it concludes, as metaphors, symbolic crystallizations of a reality too complex and diffuse to be dramatized by more empirical means. Justin Quayle, then, is an allegorical figure, an emblem of timid virtue roused to heroic action by the discovery of his own complicity with evil.
Directed by ; screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John le Carré; director of photography, César Charlone; edited by Claire Simpson; music by Alberto Iglesias; production designer, Mark Tildesley; produced by Simon Channing Williams; released by Focus Features.
Running time: 129 minutes. This film is rated R.
"The Constant Gardener" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
It has scenes of sexuality, brief nudity and violence.
John le Carre's densely plotted novels, which revolve around espionage, moral corruption and forces of evil at work around the globe, often flounder when transferred to the screen. Plots gets severely truncated and nuances are lost.
Filmmakers try to cherry-pick the "cinematic" bits from the stories -- the cloak-and-dagger maneuvers -- but those separate with difficulty from the texture of his characters' lives and the thorough documentation of how rogues, governments and multinational corporations behave.
"The Constant Gardener" is a happy exception. One reason might be the inspired choice of Fernando Meirelles, the Oscar-nominated Brazilian director of "City of God," to bring the story to the screen.
His impressionistic, guerilla style of filmmaking works surprisingly well in capturing the hypnotic urgency of le Carre's fiction. And his viewpoint is less British and more Third World. There are awkward moments, given the need to rush through a convoluted plot, and the peripheral characters that never fully come alive.
But "The Constant Gardener" gets the essence of the story.
With Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz toplining a work of clear passion, the film looks set for late summer counterprogramming as well as a competitive run with upcoming prestige offerings for Oscar nominations. Boxoffice should be steady though well short of blockbuster status.
The film, like the novel, opens with the death of a major character. Tessa Quayle (Weisz), a tireless political activist, is discovered brutally murdered in a remote area in northern Kenya. Her older husband is Justin (Fiennes), an ineffectual career diplomat attached to the British High Command in Nairobi, mostly concerned with tending his flower garden and keeping up appearances.
Initially, he takes the news with the apparent sangfroid of a true Etonian. Indeed it is Justin's associate, Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), who throws up at the sight of Tessa's mutilated body in the morgue, not Justin. Complicating his reaction is an indication that her murder might be a crime of passion: The Kenyan doctor (Hubert Kounde) with whom she was traveling has disappeared and is the chief suspect.
Justin then makes discoveries that could substantiate rumors of other infidelities by his young wife. But what no one in the community of expats in Nairobi counts on is the fierce love this man still has for the woman he scarcely got to know in their brief marriage.
The story moves in a nonlinear way as Justin turns into a mild-mannered bulldog, seeking an explanation for his wife's death.
Then, in flashbacks, he examines more closely who his wife was. In the course of his confrontation with things he previously chose not to see, he draws closer to his wife; he understands her point of view, what mattered to her, and comes to love her even more.
This odyssey pulls him into the shady world of multinational pharmaceuticals or "pharmas" as the drug giants are called.
These are organizations with enormous resources and economic power, virtual nations onto themselves, who think nothing about testing new drugs in the impoverished Third World.
Justin's investigation into what might have caused someone to order his wife's murder takes him into a scary and sinister terrain, where one feels no safer in the blazing light of day then in the mysterious dark of the night.
He visits Kibera, the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa.
In London, the British government confiscates his passport. He travels to Berlin with a fake passport to interview the scared head of a pharma watchdog group. He returns to Kenya to confront those with blood on their hands, then journeys to Sudan, where refugees live in vile conditions.
The journey ends at the strangely beautiful site of his wife's murder.
(For all the criticism of the Kenyan government by the book and the film, the same government allowed the film to shoot in that country.)
The major disappointment comes in Justin's encounters with the crooks, thugs, spies, corrupt businessmen and Her Majesty's mendacious civil servants.
These are played by such wonderful actors as Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Nick Reding and Gerard McSorley. Yet they are all too familiar types. No doubt perfectly accurate types but le Carre -- adapted here by Jeffrey Caine -- is capable of creating characters with greater subtlety and dimension.
What distracts us from such things is Meirelles' arresting style that creates a vivid sense of place. Working again with cinematographer Cesar Charlone, the director overexposes some scenes, producing a kind of white on white. Meanwhile, in the slums and villages, as with the favela in "City of God," are a riot of deeply saturated colors.
The camera jumps and tries to focus, as if a documentary film crew were shooting the film. Editor Claire Simpson keeps the story rushing forward as Alberto Iglesias' soft music, containing hints of African rock, pulsates in the background.
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
Focus Features
Focus Features presents in association with the U.
K. Film Council a Potboiler production in association with Scion Films
Credits:
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Screenwriter: Jeffrey Caine
Based on the novel by: John le Carre
Producer: Simon Channing Williams
Executive producers: Gail Egan, Robert Jones, Donald Ranvaud, Jeff Abberley, Julia Blackman
Director of photography: Cesar Charlone
Production designer: Mark Tildesley
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Costumes: Odile Dicks-Mireaux
Editor: Claire Simpson
Cast:
Justin Quayle: Ralph Fiennes
Tessa Quayle: Rachel Weisz
Sandy: Danny Huston
Sir Pellegrin: Bill Nighy
Marcus: Pete Postlethwaite
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 130 minutes
Copyright 2005 The Hollywood Reporter
'The Constant Gardener' cultivates deep interest
The problem with message movies is audiences often kill the messenger by not going to see them.
Hopefully that won't happen to the excellent new picture "The Constant Gardener," based on a John Le Carre best seller and directed with intelligence and measured intensity by Fernando Meirelles. His Brazilian film "City of God" earned Meirelles a best director Oscar nomination ? and a place on nearly every 10-best list across the country.
The verdict: A thoughtful thriller blessed with excellent actors and an inspired director.
"The Constant Gardener," which is Meirelles' English-language debut, doesn't crackle and pop like his earlier triumph. It's a more thoughtful piece, grounded in great acting, brilliant directing and a timely theme: how the giant pharmaceutical companies are exploiting the already-beleaguered African population.
Ralph Fiennes stars as Justin Quayle. As the title suggests, he's a quiet, conservative man, content to cultivate his garden and not go looking for trouble. Trouble is, Justin's a midlevel British diplomat stationed in Kenya, where trouble often comes unbidden.
We first meet Justin in England as he's waving goodbye to his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who's headed to Africa with her co-worker ? and, some say, lover ? Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Kounde) to expose the drug labels' dirty dealing.
Tessa is a passionate idealist, always at the ready to go to battle on the behalf of the have-nots. To Justin's more jaded colleagues, well-played by Bill Nighy and Danny Huston, she's a dangerous live wire, likely to pursue her do-gooding at the very moment it would do them the least good. As far as the top brass is concerned, she is, well, inappropriate.
And Tessa revels in being seen as such.
Unfortunately, her actions have tragic consequences, which transform Justin from a rational, hands-off cog in the bureaucratic machine to an impassioned man on a mission. And the more he uncovers, the more in peril he becomes, as the massive forces of corporate greed, international corruption and global indifference combine to block his efforts.
It's important that Tessa isn't portrayed as a saint. Her connection to groups with names like Women for Life is slyly amusing in that it gives the higher-ups another reason to dismiss her. Her insistence that she go to the same hospital as the locals is admirable, but it also smacks a bit of naivete and showboating.
Tessa's complexity enhances the film's impact. She may be a flawed heroine, but she's a heroine nonetheless. The pharmaceutical companies are happily dispensing outdated drugs; it's a tax write-off and a public relations ploy.
More infuriating, they are trying out untested drugs on the Kenyans, whom they see as disposable people.
Just a few months earlier, the staid Justin may have muttered something about "bad form," but he wouldn't have done anything about it. His transformation into someone willing to work outside the rules, to look into the heart of a darkness supported and sustained by so-called civilized nations and supposedly benign companies, is compelling and unnerving.
We're emotionally invested in Justin and Tessa ? at times, their relationship suggests the one between Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in "The Way We Were." She's the outspoken activist, and he's the increasingly marginalized spouse, meant to be her buffer and apologist.
Until, that is, fate intervenes.
Few actors do haunted as well as Fiennes. Or ambivalent.
Or distracted. After inexplicably turning up in questionable drivel like "Maid in Manhattan," Fiennes seems to be back on track. He gives an Oscar-worthy portrayal, holding us with his quivering half-smile and his wounded eyes.
Weisz may have an Oscar chance as well. Her Tessa is a vibrant, impressive woman who simply can't leave well enough alone ? especially when something isn't "well enough" in the least.
Meirelles gives "The Constant Gardener" an urgency yet never loses sight of the human aspect of Le Carre's story. When was the last time you choked up in the middle of a spy thriller? Ralph Fiennes' pale, wounded gaze and tight smile often lead him to play men who are pained, unsettled ?
he won a Tony award for his performance as Hamlet, Prince of Agita, and even his Nazi in Schindler's List had Issues. But it's not just his physiognomy that marks him. Fiennes' distracted, inward-turning manner projects an ambivalence about the whole business of acting, or at least of stardom, and that itchiness conveys itself to his audience, making us more apt to speak of his work with admiration and respect than with love.
Justin Quayle, the amateur plant-fancier who takes the title in The Constant Gardener, is another hooded Fiennes fellow, a man more at ease with greenhouse cuttings than with the cocktail chatter that goes along with the post of a midlevel career diplomat stationed in Kenya. But such is the clarity and passionate intelligence of Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of John le Carré's urgent 2001 novel, about deadly pharmaceutical arrogance in Africa, that Fiennes blooms in his most empathetic, extroverted, and lovable work in years.
As in any le Carré creation, the players in this one are morally inconstant people who keep secrets and betray those closest to them.
When, at the beginning of the saga, Justin's wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), is reported gruesomely murdered on an isolated stretch of country (she had been accompanied by a local doctor working to contain tuberculosis and AIDS, and the black-and-white pair had been rumored to be lovers), Justin himself really doesn't know what Tessa did with her days as a human rights ''activist.'' All he knows is that he adored her for her fire and for her commitment to fight, while he, a le Carré chap, after all, equivocated. (Weisz makes it easy to believe Tessa's fearlessness; she's as mobile, open-faced, and sexually alive as Fiennes is shuttered, and the two make a potent couple, even if the casting closes the generation gap that figures in the book.
)
Tessa's death opens The Constant Gardener. Why she died (with damning information about multinational drug malfeasance in her possession) propels the plot, as Justin awakens from his complacency to understand the posthumous truth about her real work, and, poignantly, about their own marriage. Meirelles, meanwhile, brightens the author's wide, dark field with rich color, adding his own distinctive cinematic feel for the desperation, as well as the vibrancy, of the global underclass.
Maturing the grabby style of hip-hoppy energy and visual fillips he brought to City of God (where he featured Rio de Janeiro as something between a circle of hell and a really cool setting for a music video), the Oscar-nominated Brazilian filmmaker shoots the landscape of Kenya, slums and magnificent wild territory, children and birds, with a new flow.
There's less superfluous ''art'' now, more concentration of purpose from frequent collaborator César Charlone's voluptuous cinematography. Now the shots don't waste time saying, Look at me; instead they urge, Look, look at what is really happening to millions of Africans as disease ruthlessly spreads, fertilized by a toxic mixture of corporate and governmental dither and greed.
Working from an unobtrusive screenplay by British TV scripter Jeffrey Caine, Meirelles makes his points convincingly, teasing out the secrets of weak and bullying men (among the limpest of whom are Justin's unreliable friend and diplomatic colleague, played by Danny Huston, and their frighteningly Perfect British Boss, played with high gloss by Bill Nighy), but never squanders attention away from the tragedy of epidemic disease and corruption. (Playing the opposite of limp, the ever-excellent Gerard McSorley from Bloody Sunday embodies a paragon of corporate thuggishness who's never more terrifying than when he's on the golf course.)
There is, I realize, always the chance that such a serious, it's-good-for-you description makes The Constant Gardener sound like a lemonade glass of medicine.
It's not. The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish. In flashback scenes of Justin and Tessa's life together, the chemistry between Fiennes and Weisz (previously paired in the tortured István Szabó film Sunshine) feels playfully sexy, which is not something I'd usually ascribe to Fiennes' default stance of proud hurt.
Borne on lilting snatches of African song, The Constant Gardener gives a damn while giving good ''entertainment.'' P.S.
: ''By comparison with the reality,'' le Carré explains in notes on the film, ''my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."
lAustralian politician resigns after he insults opponent's wife, pinches bottom of female journalist, and propositions another at alcohol fuelled party Insult Asian women, quit politics in Australia Sydeny, August, 29: A leading Australian politician resigned today after it was revealed that he called an opponent?s Malaysian wife a ?
Mail Order Bride?, pinched the bottom of one female journalist and propositioned another at an alcohol-fuelled party. New South Wales Opposition Liberal Party leader John Brogden told a hastily-called news conference that he regretted his ?
inappropriate? behaviour and would quit the post that could have seen him become state premier. He denied being drunk at the party thrown for the media by the Australian Hotels Association three weeks ago but admitted drinking six beers to celebrate the recent resignation of the long- ding Premier, Bob Carr.
With Carr out of the way, Brogden, 37, was tipped to have a strong chance of taking the premiership at the next state elections in 2007. But his career was in ruins today after reports of his behaviour at the party surfaced in local newspapers, and he told the news conference: ?I acted dishonourably and now is the time to act honourably.
? Prime Minister John Howard, leader of Brogden?s liberal party, earlier condemned the remarks about Carr?
s Malaysian-born wife Helena as ?just quite wrong?.
?I know Helena Carr and she?s a very gracious person.
That sort of comment should never have been made.? Carr, who resigned in July after leading Australia?
s most populous state for 10 years, rejected Brogden?s apology. ?
I think that his apology is entirely unacceptable to Helena and that is the greatest insult not only to her but of every woman of Asian background,? Carr said.
--/HEADLINE-->The country's younger generation is shedding submissive attitudes, wants careers, and longs for wealth.
And marketers are paying attention --STORY-->When the first American music videos and popular TV shows began appearing in Indian homes in the early 1990s thanks to satellite and cable, many pundits predicted Indian society would never be the same. For the first time, young Indian women saw a regular dose of sexy, scantily clad divas shimmying.
Female viewers also saw independent, successful women -- think Ally McBeal -- and fun, sensitive guys a la Friends. Sex and divorce were openly discussed in these TV imports and couples kissed passionately -- then still a taboo in Indian TV shows and movies. Indeed, the impact on younger generations of Indian women has been profound.
Whereas Indian women traditionally have been submissive to parents and husbands and valued frugality and modesty, a number of sociological studies show that young Indian females now prize financial independence, freedom to decide when to marry and have children, and glamorous careers (see BW, 8/22/05, ). TOMORROW'S BUYERS. "A generation back, women would sacrifice themselves and believed in saving," says Nisha Singhania, senior strategic planning director of Grey Worldwide India.
"Today, it is spend, spend, spend. It is O.K.
for a woman to want something for herself, and people will accept it if she goes out into a man's world making a statement." Because today's young women are the key consumer group of tomorrow, these shifts have big implications for marketing companies. And the trends come out clearly in two recent studies by Grey Global Group.
One study examined 3,400 unmarried women aged 19-22 of different income and social levels. Altogether, the project involved 40 focus groups in five large metro areas and five smaller cities. In some cases, the researchers lived with the women for a while to study them more closely.
The researchers supplemented this data with interviews of journalists, teachers, and psychologists. ? Guilt-free materialism.
Fifty-one percent of young single women in major metro areas say it's necessary to have a big house and big car to be happy. In smaller cities, 86% agreed with this statement. "This shows that the less women have, the greater are their aspirations," says Singhania.
One woman interviewed was making just $200 a year but said she wants to own a jet plane. "A typical comment in recent interviews was, 'I want money, fame and success,'" says Singhania. ?
Parental ties. Traditionally, parents regarded girls as somebody else's future property. They arranged marriages for their daughters, and then the daughters would go away and take care of their in-laws, so parents needed and doted on sons.
"As a girl, you never spoke to your parents. They spoke to you," Singhania says. But today's young women are rebelling against that.
Sixty-seven percent say they plan to take care of their parents into their old age -- and that means they need money. Unilever ( ) played on that sentiment with a recent controversial -- but successful -- ad for its Fair and Lovely line of beauty products. A daughter came home and found that her parents had no sugar for coffee because they couldn't afford it.
She became an airline hostess after using the Fair and Lovely products to make her beautiful. She then visited her parents and took them to a first-class restaurant. ?
Marital freedom. Now many women say they'll marry when ready -- not when their parents decide to marry them off. Sixty-five percent say dating is essential, and they also want to become financially independent before they marry.
More than three-quarters -- 76% -- say they want to maintain that independence afterward. Sixty percent say they'll decide how to spend their own salaries. What's more, 76% say they'll decide when to have children.
"They now regard this as the woman's decision completely," observes Singhania. In big metro areas, 24% say they never want children, and that number reaches 40% in smaller cities. ?
Individualism. Female role models in Indian culture used to personify perfection, Singhania says. Now, 62% of girls say it's O.
K. if they have faults and that people see them. "They don't want to be seen as Mrs.
Perfect," she says. "Popular characters are Phoebe of Friends and Ally McBeal. They like women who commit blunders.
" ? Careerism. A decade ago, most young women saw themselves as housewives.
After that, most said they wanted to be teachers or doctors. "If they had a profession at all, it had to be a noble cause," Singhania says. "Now, it is about glamour, money, and fame.
" A surprising 45% of young single females say they would like to be journalists. Singhania says that's largely because prominent female journalists, especially TV reporters, are seen as very glamorous. Another 39% say they would like to be managers, 38% are interested in design, and 20% think they want to be teachers.
Interestingly, 13% say they would like to be in the military. The percentage of those saying they want to be a full-time housewife was minuscule. ?
Modern husbands. "The relationship with the husband used to be one of awe," Singhania says. "Now, women want a partner and a relationship of equals.
They want to marry a man like Greg of Dharma and Greg or Chandler of Friends." A recent Whirlpool ( ) ad shows a man washing the family clothes before his wife comes home from work, while a Samsung home-appliance ad shows a husband and wife cooking together. For Indian society, the changes in young women's outlook on life is revolutionary.
For marketers, they offer interesting new opportunities to exploit.
LONDON -- Film titles can be tricky.
So much goes into the making of a movie, it's unfortunate when the title doesn't immediately conjure the picture's theme and concept. One of the best examples -- "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) -- was a much-honored film that took a good long time to find an audience because moviegoers were uncertain what it was all about. So hearing the title "The Constant Gardener" (which opens Wednesday) isn't likely to tell the average moviegoer that it's a political thriller, unusual love story and expose of corporate and government corruption -- all thrown into one film.
"But that's why we have marketing and why I'm talking to people like you," said Ralph Fiennes, chatting recently in a Dorchester Hotel suite overlooking London's Hyde Park. "And besides, it's the title of John le Carre's book that it's based on and I think his huge international fan base provides an instant audience for us. "Furthermore, when you think about it, the title is so perfect in describing Justin Quayle [Fiennes' character] and the the process he goes through in the arc of the story.
" Early on, Justin's passion for gardening seems to be the only thing he is passionate about.
Thriller, political doc or love story?
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles loved the idea that in John le Carre's novel
The Constant Gardener, the pharmaceutical industry is the bad guy.
"They make for such an interesting villain, because they do good! We use their products. I love their products!
"But at the same time, they are very powerful and extremely profitable, because they produce these great pills. It is the second most profitable industry in the world. Just arms manufacturers -- who only kill people -- ironically are the only industry more profitable than drugs," said Meirelles during a recent visit to Chicago to promote the film version of le Carre's book.
The director -- who found fame with his Oscar nomination for "City of God" in 2002 -- is intrigued by the corporate and political corruption in "The Constant Gardener." Yet, as important as those elements are, Meirelles explained, "I never came to a final decision if the film is mostly a political thriller, a drama or a love story until after I had done all the principal photography. We could have pushed the film in any direction and, in fact, some thriller sequences we shot were taken out.
The same was true with some documentary stuff on the pharmaceutical industry, which could have made the film more political." In the end, Meirelles and his team decided it was the relationship between the lead characters of Justin and Tessa that were the main component of the film. "It's more of a love story, with these thriller and political elements behind it.
" "I play this fellow who is a relatively unambitious British diplomat posted to Nairobi who loses his wife Tessa when she's brutally murdered," said Fiennes. "He starts being a very unconfrontational kind of man, but the shock of his wife's killing leads him to pick apart what went on, and in the process he revisits the nature of their relationship." In a strange way, it's a love affair in reverse -- fueled by director Fernando Meirelles' extensive use of flashbacks combined with Justin's discovery of just how much he truly did love his wife.
"I think he falls in love with her all over again after she's gone and as he uncovers what she had been up to -- her work to uncover a vast and very corrupt corporate and political conspiracy," said Fiennes. "It's particularly intriguing since -- for much of the early part of the film -- Justin is suspicious of her; thinking she was having an affair. I think the film asks questions about relationships between people and personal honesty.
The honesty between couples and not just at the level of betrayal, but just about simple communication." Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is as fervent an activist as Justin is a milquetoast, by-the-book, mild-mannered bureaucrat. In fact, one wonders how the initial attraction and quick sexual romp was sustained long enough to lead them to the altar.
There's always the old adage that "opposites attract," a concept Fiennes only buys up to a certain point. "I think it can be true, but I don't think it's true all the time. I think there has to be some understanding at some level beneath the apparent opposition.
" Still the actor believes in the final analysis the couple's relationship is the most interesting aspect of this story. "Yes, it is a thriller and I love that aspect. Yes, it is about exposing corruption, both political and corporate, but at the end of the day it is Justin's discoveries about Tessa and his adoption of her passion for the cause of saving people's lives that makes this so compelling.
" The cause in this case is uncovering the true relationship between an international drug company and the British and Kenyan governments over the testing of pharmaceuticals that possibly are endangering the lives of thousands, if not millions, of politically and economically powerless Africans. Weisz has "always been fascinated by people like Tessa, who devote their lives to causes and are willing to give up everything, including their own lives if necessary, to work for people less fortunate than themselves." Author le Carre has made it clear Tessa is actually inspired by a real woman he knew named Yvette Pierpaoli, a representative for Refugees International, killed in a car crash in Albania in the Balkans in 1999.
In the closing credits for this film, based on his novel, le Carre describes Pierpaoli as having "lived and died giving a damn." "I'm not that person," Weisz was quick to point out, claiming she knew little about Pierpaoli until after she had completed making the film. "I'm a storyteller.
I'm an entertainer. I'm an actor. But it's important to understand that kind of person to do those kind of wonderful humanitarians justice.
I really tried to get into their skin. I met people in Africa out in the field who possess that kind of dedication. I tried to absorb who they were in order to understand them and hopefully portray that kind of passion and commitment in my performance.
" For Weisz, the experience of filming in Nairobi had a lasting impact on her as a human being. "I had been to Kenya before, as a tourist on holiday," she said. "But that's a very different Africa to the Africa we were privileged to see making this movie.
" A number of key scenes were shot in Kibera -- "one of the largest slums in the world where a million people are living in a fairly small area. They live in abject poverty with no running water, no sanitation or electricity. There's a high incidence of HIV.
It's extreme poverty like I've never seen before. Tourists never go there. White people never go there.
Even Kenyans on our crew had never been there. "And yet, I have never felt more welcomed or more at home than anywhere I've ever been before. The people were so generous, warm and hospitable.
It was an extraordinary experience." Meirelles wanted to be spontaneous and subtle in how he filmed the sequences in Kibera, so at times there would just be the director, an actor or two and a cameraman holding a small, hand-held camera. "Fernando [Meirelles] just told us to interact with the people," Weisz said.
"There are several scenes that weren't even in the script, but we left them in. Children came running up calling, 'How are you? How are you?
' That's just the way it happened and Fernando wisely left that in. I loved the fact we had fictional characters interacting with real people in Africa." The experience also taught Weisz a thing or two about the cultural divide that separates so many societies in the world.
"The parents of those children who came running up asked if that's also the way children in our country spoke to strangers. I said, 'Where I live, children are taught not to speak to strangers,' and the Kenyans were flabbergasted. They could not comprehend that.
It was totally bizarre to them, given the openness and warmth of their culture." Though the gardening referenced in the title of the film is clearly a metaphor, Fiennes did chuckle when asked how much acting was involved regarding the few scenes where Justin is seen fiddling with his beloved plants. "Actually, I would love to have the time to garden," he said.
"My father was a brilliant gardener and when I was young I gardened a little bit for pocket money. I thought it was very important that we saw [Justin] handling plants in the film in his spare time -- like he knew what he was doing, even though I'm not so good at it for real. It's all part of being an actor.
" For Weisz, the atmosphere on the set was what she loved the most. "Fernando creates such a relaxed world for us to inhabit," she said. "He created a feeling where we could be relaxed -- the way a husband and wife would be for real when they are having those little intimate moments.
We were allowed to improvise and stray from the text and make things up and play a little bit. "After all, in the real world couples don't speak in neat little lines to each other. They speak over each other.
They interrupt each other. Real life is messy -- so we messed it up a little bit!"
NEW YORK - Filmmaker Fernando Meirelles isn't naive enough to believe a movie can change the world.
But it doesn't hurt to try, either.
''Films can bring awareness; you can shed light on topics and inform the audience,'' he says. ``I love to go to the cinema and learn about things.
If a movie is set in Mongolia, you learn how they live, what they eat, what their culture is like, which is fascinating to me. And although you can't change things with a movie, you can certainly affect people -- the same people who can later go out and vote and put pressure on their governments as individuals.''
Of course, it helps if your movie happens to be a smashing entertainment, too.
The Brazilian Meirelles' previous film, 2002's City of God, was a riveting, stylistic tour de force about street kids that melded the wiseguy savvy of Martin Scorsese, the cruel irony of Quentin Tarantino and the eye candy of The Matrix into something that felt vibrant, exhilarating and new.
City of God -- which set box-office records in Brazil, played in U.S.
theaters for nearly a year and earned a surprise four Oscar nominations in 2003 (including a Best Director nod for Meirelles) -- also brought international attention to the plight of Rio de Janiero's favelas, or slums, and the sad fate of its youngest dwellers.
Now comes Meirelles' next film, The Constant Gardener, which opens in theaters Wednesday. Based on the novel by John Le Carre, the movie stars Ralph Fiennes as a British diplomat stationed in Kenya investigating the mysterious murder of his activist wife (played by Rachel Weisz).
On one level, the movie is an affecting romance about a methodical, emotionally repressed man who has fallen out of love with his wife, then falls in love with her again in the process of investigating her death.
But The Constant Gardener is also a thriller, complete with hissable villains: Pharmaceutical companies testing new, potentially hazardous drugs on African citizens, who are too desperately in need of medical care to ask questions about potential side effects or demand compensation for the medical trials.
The movie interweaves those two storylines in dazzling fashion, and Meirelles, a veteran director of TV commercials, uses the same fluid camerawork and intricate editing he employed in City of God to create a complex, engrossing narrative that is as much about a mourning husband as it is about Kenya itself.
It's a strong follow-up for Meirelles, proving that City of God was no fluke. Ironically, the Sao Paulo native says he came to direct The Constant Gardener by accident. Sitting in the library lobby of Manhattan's Regency Hotel, Meirelles, 49, was flooded with offers after City of God opened in the United States, but he turned all of them down.
''They sent me some really good scripts,'' he says. ``Very different stories: the Cold War, the assassination of the archbishop in Canterbury, World War II in Italy, the Russian Mafia.''
Though Meirelles was tempted enough to fly to Los Angeles for meetings on several of the offers, he decided to continue working on his own project, a story about globalization that links various plotlines set in seven different regions around the world, including the Philippines, China, Brazil, the United States and Kenya.
Last year, as he was returning from Kenya on a research expedition for the film, Meirelles stopped in London to meet with Simon Channing Williams, who was producing The Constant Gardener. Mike Newell, who had been slated to direct the film, had bailed out in order to go off and make the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
''Simon gave me the script, and I thought it was very original, with an interesting plot and very good villains,'' Meirelles says.
``When companies test drugs in the U.S. and Canada, you sign a contract, you're paid every month, you go into the lab every two weeks for a check-up.
It's very expensive. In Africa, the people who sign the consent forms get free medical treatment for their families in exchange for testing the drugs. So it's not just an evil thing.
That's the beauty of this kind of villain: The companies are doing good as well.
And since Meirelles had just visited Kenya, where The Constant Gardener takes place, and was excited about filming there, the director put his personal project on hold (he says it will probably be his next film) and set about making his English-language debut, working with big-name actors, a studio (Focus Features) and a budget ($25 million) that, while modest in Hollywood terms, was enormous by Brazil's standards.
The process was a learning experience for Meirelles.
Fortunately, he says it was also a thoroughly happy one, since he enjoyed the same degree of creative control he had while making City of God, which he had produced himself.
''It was my next step in learning how to work with other people in the industry,'' Meirelles says. ``But they were very respectful every step of the way.
They sent notes on the script and on my first cut, but always with the remark that they were only opinions and it was ultimately my decision.''
Even after the first test screening six months ago resulted in some confusion from viewers, Meirelles says he was allowed to preserve the film's complexity and careful plot construction as he and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine had envisioned it.
''Studio executives immediately want to clarify everything in a movie,'' he says.
``But to me, being confused is not necessarily bad, because it stimulates thought and concentration. Not understanding can be good. And this is definitely a film where the audience has to be active, not passive.
''
Regardless of how The Constant Gardener fares at the box office, the movie ensures Meirelles' name will remain on the list of the recent wave of Latin American filmmakers making inroads into the Hollywood system. The director says he remains friends with Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, Dark Water), and is immensely proud of their continuing successes.
More importantly, he's happy that their collective success has inspired budding filmmakers in his country to take a chance behind the camera.
``Last year there were 65 new feature films made in Brazil, which is a new record. And the audience in Brazil for Brazilian films has grown from eight percent to 21 percent. It's very exciting, and it just inspires me to keep pushing myself to do better work.
''
Google anything, so long as its not Google IF you were C.E.O.
, wouldn't you Google yourself? At least ? Would you be surprised to discover that your recent stock sales, net worth, hobbies and contributions to various political candidates are online and easily reached with a click or two?
Schmidt by using his company's own service. The resulting article, published online at CNET's News.com under the sedate headline " ," was anything but sensationalist.
It mentioned the types of information about Mr. Schmidt that she found, providing some examples and links, and then moved on to a discussion of the larger issues. She even credited Google with sensitivity to privacy concerns.
Schmidt's private information, and then Mr. Krane called back to announce that the company would not speak to any reporter from CNET for a year.
CNET's transgression is unspeakable - literally so.
When I contacted Mr. Krane last week, he said he was not authorized to speak about the incident.
Mr.
Schmidt and his staff have had six weeks to restore a working relationship with CNET (and to apologize). They have not done so, leaving intact the impression that CNET committed lèse-majesté. So, too, did Fortune magazine in 1997, when it published a profile of Louis V.
Gerstner, then the chairman. I.B.
M. cut off contact with the offending magazine and pulled all advertising for good measure. The company did not explain the action, leaving readers to wonder whether Mr.
Gerstner had been piqued by the magazine's description of his get-outta-my-way manner on the golf course.
More recently, earlier this year pulled from the shelves of Apple's retail stores all titles published by John Wiley Sons, the publisher of a biography of Steve Jobs that displeased His Highness.
Mr.
Schmidt's is a special case, however. He or his proxy apparently was angered by a journalist who did nothing more than use for policy discussion Mr. Schmidt's own service to gather publicly available material.
Mr. Schmidt's home address comes from a Federal Election Commission database, which lists this and other details about donors who contribute more than $200 in a year to a candidate. If CNET's mention of the readily available information discomfited Mr.
Schmidt, it should not have. Two months previously, when Google was host of a briefing for members of the news media, it was Mr. Schmidt who had explained his company's ambitions so boldly: "When we talk about organizing all of the world's information, we mean all.
Google said last week that it had "proactively" reached out to the United States Defense Department to see if it had security concerns, adding that the department had not registered any to date.
More access to information, thanks to improved search-engine indexing, is better than less. But increased vulnerability comes with the package, as the Dutch and Mr.
Schmidt have found.
Book publishers are feeling insecure in their own houses, too, as whirring search-engine bots hover above them. The information in question is substantively different, however, than that held in government databases in the public domain, freely available to the citizenry.
The contents of books are protected by copyright law, and are most emphatically not freely available.
Google acknowledged the special protections extended to books under copyright when it began negotiating with publishers last year for permission to scan and then index the contents of copyrighted books. Publishers were receptive, contracts were signed, progress was made.
But Google subsequently found a speedier way to proceed: simply borrowing the bound print collections of the Harvard, Stanford and University of Michigan research libraries for its scanning. When the project is completed, Google will retain perfect digital copies, as well as provide copies to the libraries. No muss, no fuss, no negotiations with copyright holders.
He described Google's recent actions as "a very aggressive, pushy style that says, 'We don't care that your business is different than ours.' "
THE Association of American University Presses is less concerned about the bits from books that would appear in Google's search results than about digital copies of each work, infinitely reproducible, whose use and safekeeping would not be governed by an agreement with the copyright holder. Michigan's contract with Google reserves for the university the right in the future to share its digital copies with "partner research libraries.
When asked what a press will do when it is able to sell only a single bound copy of a scholarly work, Mr. Givler laughed mirthlessly and said, "Charge $40,000 for the one copy."
One of the personal items revealed when CNET Googled Mr.
Schmidt was a speaker's biography that he had apparently provided the Computer History Museum for a talk he gave four years ago. He described himself then as a "political junkie who never tires of debating the great issues of our day." Very well, Mr.
Schmidt. When CNET next calls, please pick up the phone and let this debate begin.
Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley.
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