After a quick flirtation, sex, and marriage (all of which Meirelles and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine pull off with sensuous wit), Tessa leaves for Kenya to fight the good fight, one impoverished citizen and one unfeeling government officer at a time, while Justin tries to push policy through diplomatic means. Spewing insolence, Tessa challenges his institutionalized complacency, and Justin is thoroughly shaken-and (like a far more dashing international figure) stirred.

Justin and Tessa meet when he gives a boilerplate speech about government policy. In the process of this idealistic labor, she entrances-and radicalizes-our humble British functionary. Her aim was straightforward: to pressure international drug companies to lower prices and prevent them from using African citizens with AIDS and tuberculosis as guinea pigs. Much of the movie consists of flashbacks to her short life: Rachel Weisz’s Tessa was a crusader for the poor, a privileged young woman who used her small bit of power and enormous reserves of intelligence, guile, and sex appeal to get into foreign countries where militant whites might otherwise be rebuffed. Le Carré’s politics haven’t been as artfully transferred to the movies since Richard Burton starred in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965), a film so assiduously bleak, so British-German dour, it should have inspired a new genre: film gris.įiennes stars as London-based Justin Quayle, first secretary of the British chancery in Nairobi his wife, as we learn in the opening moments of the movie, has been found raped and murdered in Kenya.

In the transfixing thriller The Constant Gardener-an adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel by City of God director Fernando Meirelles-Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year’s subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances, modulating from callow British diplomat to impassioned lover of both Rachel Weisz and Third World justice.

Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Focus Features

The constant gardener movie overview