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BAD
PHARMA
INTO AFRICA
Rachel Weisz as Tessa,
whose involvement in the
lives of the people of the
Nairobi slum of Kibera
eventually costs her her life.
the constant gardener
RAPTUROUSLY RECEIVED WHEREVER IT HAS SCREENED, THE CONSTANT GARDENER LOOKS TO BE THE
DEFINITIVE ADAPTATION OF
A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL.
BUT, SUGGESTS NICK RODDICK, IT MANAGES
THIS BY NOT BEING
STRICTLY FAITHFUL
TO THE ORIGINAL BOOK.
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Interviewed on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme recently, novelist John le Carré admitted that he had rarely been pleased with screen adaptations of his novels. But he made a major and extremely emphatic exception for the latest, The Constant Gardener, adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name by Jeffrey Caine and directed by Brazilian sensation Fernando Meirelles (City of God). Le Carré was also on-hand to support the film when, the day after his 74th birthday, it opened the London Film Festival last month.
What is particularly interesting about the novelist’s enthusiasm for the film, however, is the reason he gave: he admired it, he said, not for its absolute fidelity, but for the fact that it had departed in a hundred ways from the original. Le Carré loved Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener as a film in the same way that most of those involved in the film had loved The Constant Gardener as a novel.
All of which must have come as the ultimate compliment to Caine. “I’m a long-time admirer of John le Carré’s writing and have always felt – in common with many of his readers – that the films made from his novels have rarely done them justice,” says the screenwriter (who, like the novelist, was a school teacher before becoming a full-time writer).
Le Carré is a much more complex writer than his reputation as a master of the spy thriller genre suggests. Themes of friendship, love and loyalty (think of the almost unbearable sense of betrayal felt by George Smiley in the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy series of books when his wife deserts him) are closely woven into the plots. And the political nature of le Carré’s work, which initially expressed itself through the ruthless manoeuvrings of the British political elite, has gradually moved into the foreground - and become more global in its reach - in such recent works as The Tailor of Panama, Absolute Friends and, of course, The Constant Gardener.
The film’s story is told in flashback as Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat in Kenya, learns of the death of his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz). As Justin slowly and inexorably unearths the involvement of a multinational pharmaceutical giant in the events that led up to (and ultimately caused) Tessa’s death, so we discover the whirlwind romance and the slow growth of true love between an unlikely couple. Justin is an unobtrusive, by-the-book career diplomat whose instinct is never to become involved; Tessa is an impulsive radical who cannot not get involved. The conspiracy by what le Carré calls ‘Big Pharma’ is the engine of the novel; but the love affair between Tessa and Justin is the fuel that drives it.
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