john le carre the constant gardener review

More importantly perhaps even than this, Justin uncovers painful secrets about his marriage, involving a messy and very human renegotiation of friendship with his colleague Sandy: another very good performance from Danny Huston, though perhaps a little hobbled by having to do an English accent. He will not rest until he finds the truth about Tess's murder, which turns out to be a queasy conspiracy involving the exploitation of HIV-positive Africans, going up to the top of the British establishment. They marry and during a difficult posting to Kenya, Justin is informed that Tess has been killed while on her fact-finding trip into remote territory with an aid worker. Fiennes is Justin, a shy, introspective junior diplomat who falls in love with Tess (Weisz), a beautiful and fiery political activist. The Constant Gardener is a love story told in retrospect. The performances from Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are excellent, perhaps the very best of their careers, and there is first-rate support, particularly from Bill Nighy as the Mephistophelean mandarin from the Foreign Office.

We get rage, restless curiosity, agonised self-reproach and whole landscapes lit up with lightning flashes of paranoia. Instead, Meirelles gives us something gutsier and less English. There is certainly none of the torpid melancholy and disillusion that tend to creep into screen versions of Le Carré - a reflex, perhaps, of his status as the most literary of spy novelists, whose works are sometimes thought of with a kind of Brideshead oboe playing regretfully somewhere in the background. Its shrewd producer, Simon Channing-Williams, had the inspired idea of hiring the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles to direct, and Meirelles has brought to this conspiracy-thriller-cum-love-story the unceasing energy and attack that characterised his sensational debut film City of God. Like The English Patient, there's a fair bit of grandstanding, but this film more than carries it off.

This version of John Le Carré's 2001 novel is conceived on a grand, almost operatic scale with fervent and passionate performances from actors who come the new year may need shopping trolleys for the all the statuettes. T here are some films which have Oscar-contender written all the way through them like a stick of rock.

John le carre the constant gardener review