The Constant Gardener

Herald rating: * * * *

The dense literary style of John le Carre's novels have made for difficult transitions to the screen, big or small. Until now.

Screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, a veteran of television drama and a James Bond or two, has turned this 2001 novel into a full-throttle conspiracy thriller that is both sobering and engrossing. That's not to say the finished film is without subtlety. Indeed its main character, Justin Quayle (Fiennes), is a figure Graham Greene might have created: a man in a crisis both private and public, both political and personal. He's also a man fighting for his life.

Quayle, a mid-level British diplomat in Kenya, is a hobby gardener whose reliability is highly prized in Whitehall. He's a dependable player from a long family line of such people, a team man. But when his wife Tessa (Weisz), a sometime journalist who is something of an activist, is brutally murdered along with a co-worker, Justin begins to realise that his faith in the establishment may have been misplaced.

Caine and director Meirelles tell the story in flashback, recounting the couple's unusual meeting and brief courtship, observing how Justin first patronises and dismisses and later cringes at Tessa's activism, and watching the slow disintegration of a man who comes to realise that he's been betrayed at every level of his life.

Meirelles, a Brazilian who helmed the spellbinding slum drama City of God, displays great restraint, though the kinetic, often handheld, camerawork keeps us constantly on edge.

Many of the sequences are shot documentary-style on the street rather than with extras and he's great at capturing small moments in the edges of shots.

The conspiracy Justin digs up involves some dirty dealing by big pharmaceutical companies which, in the interests of clarity, has probably been stripped of some of its real-life complexity but the plot is both plausible and passionate.

Fiennes is deeply impressive here, as a man broken by grief and stiffened by rage. There are terrific supporting performances, particularly from the wonderful Nighy as the reptilian Foreign Office puppetmaster, and Huston, a more complicated and human villain.

The film is far from faultless. Some sequences, particularly one involving the bereaved Justin in a Chelsea garden, needed much sharper editing and there was no need to give Postlethwaite's aid worker a dodgy Afrikaans accent.

But this is a powerful and affecting film, a thinking person's thriller.

Strongly recommended.

CAST: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite
DIRECTOR: Fernando Meirelles
RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes
RATING: M, contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes
SCREENING: All cinemas