The Constant Gardener (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

We have a strange disagreement on this one. Scoop really liked the movie, although harshly criticizing the fact that it engaged in sermonizing without performing even a perfunctory study of its subject matter. In the end, Scoop overlooked that and realized that the film had left him with a feeling of having experienced something worthwhile, and that he'd like to see it again! On the other hand, Tuna was unimpressed by the film, even though he had no problem with the sermonizing! We both agree that it is a C+ on our scale - a strong film for a highly targeted audience, but lacking in wide crossover appeal because of its arty, wordy, convoluted narrative style.

Scoop's comments in white:

I generally have some patience with paranoid political thrillers when the politics are merely naive and the authors have done at least a little bit of research. I lost my patience with this one. The politics of this movie are not only naive, but frankly downright stupid. Even more important than that, the politics of the film are lazy. There are many genuine concerns one should have about the drug companies' attitudes toward Africa, and the relationship between the profit motivation and human compassion. These are important issues that affect the future of humankind. It would not be difficult at all to incorporate these concerns into the structure of a political thriller, probably even within this film with only minor modifications. The filmmakers were simply too lazy to research these issues, and by presenting problems which do not exist, the film simply distracts attention from the real problems.

First, let's talk about the specific conspiracy which the film treats. A drug company has been testing some new medicines in Africa. The test results show that the drugs work fine, but have some devastating side-effects. The problems could be fixed, but the time-consuming process of redesigning the product, re-testing, and resubmitting the product for FDA approval would cost them their competitive advantage. By the time they manage to complete the process, another company could beat them to the market, or even to critical patents. That means they wave bye-bye to 100% market share and mega-profits. So they decide to falsify the test results. The heroine of The Constant Gardener gets wind of all that, and it costs her her life.

Could this happen?

Well, I've been on this planet long enough to know that just about anything COULD happen, but this scenario is unlikely. First of all, it assumes the the national health services and the FDA will simply accept test outcomes which are handed to them by people with a vested financial interest in the results. Second, it assumes that drug company executives do not respect normal human codes of conduct, and are perfectly willing to circulate drugs which they know to be capable of serious harm to the entire human race. Third, it assumes that a drug company conducting its own testing would hide certain consequences of drug use even though the same consequences would start to appear immediately after the drug was widely marketed. So how would they then manage to explain that the test results failed to show those same side effects? It is the third point which is the critical one. As the script points out correctly, drug companies are not charitable institutions, and thus base their decisions on maximizing their profitability. In the case presented in this film, the liability resulting from lawsuits, especially in the United States, would be hundreds of times greater than the profits they could hope to gain from selling the product. The decision to falsify those test results would be a bad financial decision. And that's not even considering the very real fact that their rival corporations would be sneaking off with the drugs and conducting their own tests. Corporations compete against one another - sometimes viciously. The market has its own sense of balance, even if it does not always seem to produce just results.

Could something similar happen?

Maybe, but it would require a massive collusion between the corporation and various governments, as well as a intricate web of corporate malfeasance. Such a thing is possible. Enron has demonstrated that companies are capable of extremely intricate maneuvering to falsify reports, and Halliburton has demonstrated that corporations can have friends in very high places. Put them together and a scandal like the one pictured in The Constant Gardener could happen, but it would not be a simple matter. If they were going to attempt such a thing, it would require the falsification of results from an independent testing lab, and it would require that no connection could ever be established between the pharmaceutical company and an established, trusted lab. In such a case, the drug company would not be held responsible for the inaccurate reports, because they would have come from a completely independent firm, and therefore, the drug company would reap the profits while being in a position virtually immune from lawsuits. This scenario is virtually impossible, however, because it is not enough simply to create the independent results. The key point is 100% deniability, therefore immunity from lawsuits. That's almost impossible to pull off. First, it would be difficult to keep the guilty knowledge in the drug company confined to one trusted individual, although that would be necessary. Second, it would be difficult to hide the connection between the drug company and the bribed scientists. Sooner or later somebody will drink too much and let something slip, or somebody will buy a house that they shouldn't be able to afford, and then the frazil will hit the fire. Finally, even if I were a complete sleazeball of Enronic proportions, I would not cover up potentially fatal or horrible side-effects. The directors and officers of large corporations may be greedy and under pressure to produce, but they are human beings, just like the rest of us.

So what really could happen?

Here's a real-life scenario. Drug companies currently make enormous market-driven profits from selling items at a vast premium over their cost of ingredients. They sell each AIDS cocktail for several dollars, and the cocktails can probably be manufactured for a few cents. It is the market which determines the price of the medicine. Therefore, you could create a very healthy business by creating the same pills in your basement for the same few cents and selling them for one dollar. In fact, if you were allowed to do so, you could cut the price by as much as 95%, still make a profit, and take nearly 100% of the market. Not only that, but by making the drug more affordable, you would get the drugs into the hands of more people who need it. Of course, you are not allowed to do that. The drugs you wish to manufacture are undoubtedly protected by the international laws and agreements respecting intellectual property. The formula probably belongs to somebody, and you can't just start making it in your basement and selling it from your kids' roadside lemonade stand. This, however, is a complex issue which balances morality and profits. Liberal activists have a very strong point when they say that if we can relieve the worldwide AIDS epidemic, we should do so, even if it means lower profits for the drug companies. For many this is a matter of simple human compassion, as well as a long-range strategy to prevent the epidemic from spreading to the developed nations. Many of the African governments agree with this position, and some are even creating the generic medicines in their own figurative basements. The drug companies are opposed to this, of course, and have in the past even pressured American legislators to create sanctions against South Africa for these allegedly vile infractions.

Of course Africa really is headed for an apocalypse, so one can make a great fictional story from the real issues. In fact, one could have made this same damned movie using plausible circumstances! Rachel Weisz could have been an activist who somehow stumbled on evidence of some dirty dealings between drug company lobbyists and American politicians. Theoretically, her evidence, if revealed to the world, could be enough to persuade South Africa to defy international sanctions permanently for the greater good of its population. As a result South Africa would ignore patent law and opt to produce or import cheap generic knock-offs of AIDS medicine. (They really would do this. Indeed, they really did do this, pretty much.) With billions of dollars and many distinguished reputations at stake, and ol' Rachel in the way, she might easily end up dead, and we would still have the same movie. The authors of the film (including John le Carre, who wrote the source novel) did not choose that route, which would have required presenting a balanced and realistic look at a complex, two-sided struggle which needs to be resolved by compromise and mutual goodwill. (Of course it's two-sided. Not only are the drug companies defending legitimate intellectual property rights, but they also, after all, justify their astronomical gross profits by the fact that those dollars finance current and future research and development, which is a good thing. The top ten pharmaceutical companies spend about 25 billion dollars per year on R&D.) Instead, the story presented some brain-dead one-dimensional paranoid fiction far from the realm of plausibility, if not totally impossible.

There is one other general point to be made about the film's overview of the relationship between the drug companies and Africa. The film suggests that the drug companies use Africa for their testing and dumping grounds. I'm sure there is a lot of truth to that, but it is a point which is pre-spun negatively by the very phrases which describe it. Is it really a bad thing that the pharmaceutical companies test new products in poor countries? Is giving poor people the latest experimental medicines worse than the alternative - which is for poor people to have no medicine at all? Is the film suggesting that medicines should not be tested? If so, how are the developers to determine whether the medicines are effective and safe, and how are the national health services and the FDA to make informed decisions about approving them? Those are complex questions which cannot be solved with a dismissive wave of the hand, as the Pete Postlethwaite character does in this film. Testing is a complex multi-sided issue. On the other hand, dumping actually is not. It is an issue about which compassionate liberals are simply wrong. Let us assume that the pharmaceutical corporations have vast amounts of still-potent drugs which have passed their expiration dates. Do you want them to destroy those drugs, as the farmers destroyed their rotting, unsellable oranges during the Great Depression, or would you rather they offer them to the world health and relief organizations, who would recommend them to the Third World as their own scientists and doctors see fit? The screenplay of The Constant Gardener seems to indicate that all of that expired medicine is worthless junk, but frankly, that's just a lot of malarkey. That medicine is almost always just as good as the medicine you and I take from our medicine cabinets. (In fact, if you actually look at the bottles in your medicine cabinets, you'll probably find that a lot of your medicine has "expired.") I worked for years in the food industry, and we had a similar controversy. We donated expired food products to organizations like homeless shelters. This was not something which we did publicly in order to reap a harvest of goodwill, but simply our response when charitable organizations asked us, "Say, that stuff you're going to throw out, can we have it? We'll pick it up, and it will be no trouble for you." And yet, inevitably, some crusaders would appear from time to time and accuse us of dumping spoiled food on the poor. The same food, mind you, that I would often take home myself when given the chance. (Expiration dates are not calculated to take products to the very edge of their useful shelf life, to say the least.) What should we have said? "No, we need to destroy it!" There is no way for the food conglomerates to achieve a winning position on this chessboard because the game is rigged. The reason we started donating unmarketable food in the first place is because the liberal activists accused us of immorally destroying perfectly good food while people were starving! (See Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 25, for the heartbreaking details.) We are immoral if we give unmarketable food to the poor, and we are immoral if we destroy that food while people are starving. Frankly, there doesn't seem to be a correct moral position. The drug companies are in the identical position with regard to expired medicines. Do you want them to throw away that perfectly good medicine when millions of people in the world could use it? That makes no sense to me.

Enough about the film's bizarrely naive and unresearched politics.

Let's discuss the story.

As much as this film irritated me with its ignorance, it impressed me with its skillful manipulation of characters and moods. It is not possible to watch this film without feeling emotionally drawn into the problems and rhythms of Africa - the disease, the overcrowding in the cities, the lack of arable land in the vast unpopulated interior, the poverty, the lack of progress, the corruption, the music, the faces of the children. The director doesn't really editorialize about the conditions. He just shows them. Accurately. That is enough.

Even more important than the effective use of Africa as a character in the film is the simple love story. In essence, The Constant Gardener is about a man who falls in love with a dead woman, one who was already his hastily-wed wife. I'm oversimplifying to avoid spoiling the denouement of the film, but that is the essence of it. Yes, I'm aware that this film has not been marketed as a love story, but that is what it does best. As The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out so eloquently, "It's a love story only in passing. And yet the love story is what lingers in the mind and gives energy and meaning to everything that happens on-screen." The conspiracy-based thriller has some great moments, but is generally boring, uses too many hackneyed devices (supernatural feats of hacking skill, and the presence of so many convenient incriminating letters that they must grow free on the velde), and involves too many minor characters to hold one's complete interest. Two things did stick in my mind: the film's compassion for the poor of Africa, and its limning of a rich and involving love story. Ralph Fiennes plays an apolitical, mild-mannered, junior British diplomat in Africa; Rachel Weisz plays his strident activist wife, a loose cannon who dies a few minutes into the story. He is obsessed by her death and haunted by her memory. As he starts to dig into the circumstances surrounding her murder, he suspects at first that he was her pawn, a convenient lover used as a free ticket to Africa. He seems to uncover painful evidence of her infidelities and a secret life she lived behind his back. He can't believe that he brought this secretive and totally undiplomatic woman into his life in the diplomatic service, thus hurting his career as well as his psyche. Yet he cannot turn away from the investigation and, as he is drawn deeper into his wife's web of intrigue, he finds that things are not what they seemed at first or even second glance.

This script was an excellent vehicle for Ralph Fiennes to show what a good actor can do with a fundamentally undramatic part. This is no Richard Harris role. Fiennes spends no time making emotional speeches to his unborn child or waving his sword at the heavens while cursing God. Fiennes plays an inoffensive man who's really into plants. He manages to create a lot of emotional power despite having a smaller-than-life role as the generator of that power. As the script progresses, the Fiennes character acquires an important legacy from his departed wife - the conscience and backbone he had previously lacked - and this development enables the actor to show the character's growth, not in big broad showy strokes, but in subtle nuances. The best thing an actor can do is to bring the audience right into the heart of the character, and that's exactly what Fiennes did here. He even smiled a couple of times! (Although, it must be admitted, those smiles instantly transformed his handsome face into the visage of a deranged mass murderer. I can see why he hasn't tried it very often in the past.)

This is a good movie but, in my opinion, the critics were unduly impressed. Yahoo voters (B) and IMDb voters (7.6) seem to have it pegged more accurately. It is not a masterpiece worthy of Best Picture honors, as some have suggested. Those sentiments must have resulted from the drought of good films in the first half of 2005, like an awe-filled reaction to ordinary tepid water from a man dying of thirst. It is, however, a memorable film which leaves behind some indelible images.