Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Red-125 The Constant Gardener (2005) directed by Fernando Meirelles and based on a novel by John le Carré, is an international thriller. It also had international locations--England, Germany, Kenya, and Sudan.The movie is what you'd expect from Le Carré--gripping, powerful, and hard to predict. However, this film also had a statement to make. The statement is that the governments of wealthy nations collude with Big Pharma--and, of course, with other corporations--to use poor people in poor nations for their own profit.According to the website, The British High Commission in Kenya "maintains and develops relations between the UK and Kenya." In the movie, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) is a British diplomat who is posted to Kenya. His wife, Tessa, (Rachel Weisz) accompanies him.Tessa is like a terrier, as Justin says. She knows there is dirty business going on in regard to the distribution of a new medicine for tuberculosis. The plot moves forward from there. Bad things happen when you least expect them, no one has clean hands, and virtue is rarely rewarded.Both Fiennes and Weisz are extraordinarily talented actors, and they bring their talents and skills to their parts. (Weisz won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in this film.) Bill Nighy brings his great acting skills to the role of Sir Bernard Pellegrin, who is Quayle's boss. Pellegrin may have the dirtiest hands of all.There were several flaws in the plot. (I didn't read the book, so I don't know if they were Fernando Meirelles's or John le Carré's flaws.) A scene at a diplomatic reception wouldn't have happened. Tessa is a diplomat's wife. She wouldn't confront one of the bad guys in so vicious and public a fashion. A seasoned diplomat has a letter that will ruin him if revealed. He might have shown it to someone, if the reward were great enough. However, he would never let it out of his hands. Still, most of the film appears realistic, and the plot is fascinating.I had a problem with the editing between two scenes. (Granted, the editor was nominated for an Oscar.) We see Quayle being brutally beaten in one scene. In the next frame, he has a few minor nicks on his face. How much time has passed? I don't like to quibble, but this was a major film with talented actors. We overlook matters like this in Indie films, but not in blockbusters.As I've written, the acting was superb. However, even with all this acting talent, The Constant Gardener would be just another good film adaptation of one of James Le Carré's thriller novels. What makes the difference is the on-location photography. Director Meirelles pulled out all the stops to show us Africa. We see scene after scene of the African people and the African landscapes . This movie literally has a cast of thousands. It's one of the most exciting and colorful on-location movies I've ever seen. The film also contains some great African music. Many people don't bother to watch the movie credits, especially if they're at home. I suggest that you watch the credits, because they have a remarkable sound track of music from Africa.Because of the photography, this film will work best on the large screen. We saw it on DVD, because, realistically, that was the only way to see it. It still worked, but I wish I had seen it in a theater when it was released.However, large screen or small screen, The Constant Gardener is a winner. Seek it out and watch it!

SquigglyCrunch The Constant Gardener follows a man who, after his wife's death, begins to suspect that she was murdered. He goes digging, and ultimately gets into much more trouble than he'd expected. I absolutely loved this movie. I don't know why exactly, save for what I'm about to write about, but it was enthralling. I loved it. For starters, the acting. Ralph Fiennes is mesmerizing. His acting is subtle and full of depth, and how he got snubbed in the acting category of the Oscars is beyond me. This is the best performance I've ever seen from him. As for Rachel Weisz, she's great too. Her performance is less complex, but her character is interesting and a real treat to see on screen. Other performances, such as that of Pete Postlethwaite which weren't as important, are also great. Everyone who needed to be was great in this movie. The writing is probably the best part. The story is deep and engaging, and the dialogue is expertly written. The characters don't spoon feed the audience any information, not even subtly or little by little. You have to pay attention, and through that you can put together what's going on. You may put some things together later than you're supposed to, but that's because the characters speak to each other as if they're real people having a real discussion who don't need to re-explain stuff to each other, so there's no need for even the slightest bit of exposition. It's great to see the amount of respect the writers have for their audience with this movie. They respect us enough to use our brains and figure out what's going on. And to top it off, the directing is great. The shots are beautiful, and on occasion we get hand-held camera scenes from the perspective of the main character, which do a great job of capturing the tone of the film. However, the performances that weren't important were pretty mediocre. They were bearable, but distracting nevertheless. Despite all the praise, this is a very boring movie. I don't know how, if I was just tired at the time or what, but I was pretty close to nodding off for a lot of this movie. I ended up taking a couple breaks just to keep myself awake. Overall The Constant Gardener is great. While it was slow, I think that was more because of my own mood than anything. Otherwise the movie is extremely well performed, utterly enthralling in every aspect, and very well directed. I can't wait to see it again, and in the end I would definitely recommend this movie.

Robert J. Maxwell These days we often read of "raids" by some radical outlaw group on third-world settlements. The image we have must be abstract for most of us because we've never been through one or seen one on video. The most shocking scene in this film describes such a raid. It results in hasty flight, kidnapping, and death. It's terrifying.Ralph Fiennes is a minor diplomat whose wife, Rachel Weisz, disappears while doing some humanitarian work in Africa.The plot involves a corrupt pharmaceutical company, friends that can't be trusted, beatings by strangers, and ultimately murder -- not counting the murders of the African patients who died as a result of ineffective medicines. Weisz mostly appears in overlighted flashbacks, a beautiful woman with a splendid broad nose.Fiennes unravels the mystery, to his own disadvantage, but it's a complicated business with many characters, helpful and deceitful, worthy of John Le Carré.Fiennes is good, it seems, no matter what his role. He was a government contractor in "The Hurt Locker" and looked dangerous. Here, he's earnest, determined, and in the end resigned.Aside from the usual, lamentable habit of shaking the camera and editing the film into tiny bits, the director does a good job of capturing Kenya in all its third-worldliness. The litter-strewn streets of the towns; the bleak desolation of its outback. The photography is in high contrast and drained of some color, more in some scenes than others. No slow motion, thank God.The flashbacks to Fiennes and Weisz together are overexposed and the effect is that of walking out of a dark theater into blazing sunlight. When we're not in Africa, we're in one of London's impeccably appointed private clubs with lunches and ridiculous rules.Nice job overall.

Mmentzer1991 This honestly was a terrible movie I'm a big movie guy so I go to Salvation Army or Goodwill and buy movies buy the box load n what I like I keep and what I don't I return and this is definitely going back. It starts off with a teacher dating (n later marrying) one of his students and she's like a real big "left wing" liberal "save the people" type and they end up in Africa and she dies, but the story goes like backwards from before she dies and the whole time she's with this black African that I never could tell if she was "with", while she's married. I couldn't even sit and watch the whole movie the plot was Absolutely terrible, I shut it off half way through the only thing I give it is it's got the visual and audio techniques of a big budget film, but as far as the story goes; terrible. The cover of the DVD box way exaggerated the film. Save yourself the time.