The Constant Gardener

Herald rating: * * * *

Well, it would have been on my Best Picture shortlist. This intimate and convoluted, acute and rambling, literate and improvised film works on two levels: as a portrait of a marriage and as an indictment of a wider immorality.

It has much in common with another excellent movie that did get the Oscar nod, Crash. Perhaps that was an issue for the Academy. Or perhaps it's just too much to expect that they would get it right twice in one year.

Ralph Fiennes is Justin Quayle, a shy British diplomat who happens on love later in life with Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a committed activist. They return to his post in Kenya where he tends his garden as she pursues her causes. His flowers bloom, his marriage withers. Her passions overwhelm her: for the sick, the lame and the halt; against the pharmaceutical multinationals who profit from their continued suffering; perhaps, too, for Arnold Bluhem (Hubert Kounde), the committed doctor who tends the shanty towns.

It is not giving away the plot to tell you that Tessa dies. For the film - told largely in flashback - is the growing of Justin, as he attempts to find the truth about his wife and the doctor, about her death, and what Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston), the grey-suited and grey-minded embassy official and big-business interests may have had to do with it.

There is truth, too, in the telling. For the film was shot largely on location, and many scenes of Fiennes and Weisz in Nairobi's shantytowns were improvised. Both stars are exceptional. One of the few directors who could have interpreted John le Carre's tale is Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian intellectual who exposed his homeland's underbelly in City of God and focuses, again, on the West's exploitation of the Third World.

On the DVD, John le Carre discusses the inspiration for the novel and how he was once burned (The Little Drummer Girl) and twice shy of Hollywood, but producer Simon Channing-Williams persuaded him to sell the rights. Embracing Africa: Filming in Kenya reveals that the film was to be shot in South Africa but the Kenyan people and the beauty of their country seduced them. Mereilles and Channing-Williams discuss the logistics of filming in Nairobi, how they hired locals as extras (guess that doesn't count as exploiting the Third World). Anatomy of a Global Thriller is a missable behind-the-scenes.

* Dvd, video rental today