The Constant Gardener

Fernando Meirelles's follow up to the critically acclaimed and very powerful City of God, is The Constant Gardener, a political thriller about an activist and her fight against the pharmaceutical corporations illegally running drug tests in Africa. Based on John le Carre's novel of the same name (which sucks by the way, the title, as it tells you nothing about the story other than a character is probably a gardener, which is true), the movie shows a reality of Africa not many know about, but the character's personal dramas are boring, and some characters, specially Rachel Weisz's Tessa, are not likeable, at least not to me, despite the fact that she's pregnant and is fighting for a good cause.

The movie is kind of divided in 2 stories after the an introduction in which we learn how activist named Tessa gets attached to Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat, and after a passionate day she pretty much gets herself married to him with the sole purpose of going to Africa, it seems. And right after that (in the movie, not in the story's timeline) we learn that she was killed in Kenya after an attack to her car. The driver, an African activist just like her, has not been found yet.

So now we have 45 minutes or so of flashbacks about Tessa's work in Kenya, fighting to bring down these corporations testing on the sick people in Africa. While everybody thinks they're actually helping by giving them medicine, they are giving them teh medicine, but they are also testing other medicine's on them, which they don't need and it ends up actually killing them in most cases. Tessa's methods include manipulating people, maybe even cheating on her husband with the aforementioned fellow activist named Arnold (Hubert Kounde) or with Justin's friendand coleague Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), a British high commissioner. Her enemies include Bill Nighy as Sir Bernard Pellegrin, the head of the Foreign Office (and Justin's superior) and Pete Postlethwaite as Marcus Lorbeer, one of the doctor's doing the deadly drug tests.

After we find out the dangerous stuff Tessa got herself into we jump into Justin's investigation of her wife's death. This includes the same character and places Tessa interacted with before she died. We find out lots of bad stuff about her here, and it brings up the question about their relationship. Justin didn't really love I thinl. He though he did, but he didn't know the real Tessa until she died and he found out all that stuff about her, then he was really in love, and found the peace in her death.

The performances are good, but not as great as everybody is saying they are. Maybe I didnt like them as much because I really didnt like some characters, specially Tessa which I hated. Fernando Meirelles' work behind the camera was better than the acting, and the cinematography by Cesar Charlone was really great.
The Constant Gardener is confusing at times with so many characters and the story going back and forth in time, and while interesting and important, is just boring.