After dinner last night, Svet and I finally got around to watching a DVD we rented about a week ago and have started and stopped several times called The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and based on a John le Carré novel. It was rather a depressing movie. Fiennes plays a British diplomat in Kenya who marries a young political activist (Rachel Weisz) who had heckled him at one of his diplomatic presentations. The movie jumps to him identifying her body at the morgue after she and a native physician had been found murdered, and the whole rest of the movie was devoted to his search for the truth about her political activities and background and the people who murdered her. The bad guys turned out to be a multinational pharmaceuticals corporation which was doing questionable drug trials in Kenya and trying to silence her dissent, but this was all set out in the beginning of the movie, so there was no suspense as we watched Fiennes' trials and tribulations for the next two hours. The only "mystery" which I'll leave to you is the issue of what happens to the pharmaceutical corporation.
The movie went for a lot of scenic African vistas and did a lot of gratuitous closeups of cute African children who had nothing to do with the story line. They also took a rather more bleeding-heart-liberal viewpoint in the movie than was in the novel, but that's very Hollywood these days. The movie reviewers all thought very highly of this movie last summer, but I was not that impressed with the acting, the direction, or really with the cinematography, and the screenplay really dragged (especially since we had to start and stop the movie three different days before we embarked upon a mandatory watching!). I can't decide whether to give the movie a B- or a C+.
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