The story dramatizes and gives a human face to the exploitation of the human rights abuses of multinational corporations in their operational organizations and in particular brings unprecedented exposure of the pharmaceutical industries corrupt complicity against the African poor. It is an anti globalization story which is humanized by a tale of bereavement and betrayal. The Constant Gardener is a socially relevant film in its attempt to educate and mobilize human rights activation and conscience. Amnesty International (2007) commends it as “A brave and compelling work that addresses human rights issues.”
Poverty and environmental degradation in the Third World is due to the debt crisis which is its colonial heritage from the West. In Africa, millions of illiterate and unskilled people struggle against impoverished rural environments, lacking basic economic and social infrastructure such as education, basic sanitation, and electricity (Jill Hills 1996).
Africa is an immensely rich continent impoverished by the North extracting its resources for their own enrichment. Sissako (2007) states “While we speak a lot of Africa, rarely is she offered the choice to speak for herself. Europe and the West see Africa as a continent that is not conscious of what is happening to it, which is not true.”(p31)
Gallafent (2006) points out that “in taking glamorous stars and locating them in Africa, the film is doing something that is familiar through its cinematic antecedents.” Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is an English heiress who turns “a love affair with a minor diplomat into a new life in Africa.”
Tessa arrives at Justin's office and asks to go with him to Africa thus proposing marriage, as if the issues were linked. (p 59). Gallafent points out that “Englishness is reinforced by casting and performance.” He states that The British High Commission in Nairobi “offers not simply a world of Englishness but one in which colonial habits seem to continue... spacious houses, Africa servants and leisure to enjoy cricket and golf.” (p62)
Calhouun, (2007) questions the use of Africa in “white conscience films” stating that “black suffering on white faces is beginning to look like a standard feature of the American and European productions.” Calhouun analyzers The Constant Gardener as one such example and as he states the film is a story concerning the journey of two European protagonists in Africa, and “As in a jungle safari, we are provided with white guides to lead us through black pain (and) black suffering on white faces is beginning to look like a standard feature of the American and European productions.” The story is set in Africa but seen through European eyes hence it loses its immediacy of the suffering of Kenyans. (p34) As Gallafent (2006) states “The film seems to wish to present an image of an Africa that is essentially unaffected by modernity, in terms of either social behaviour or landscape.”(p 65).
The moral claims of the poor demand a more equitable way with the international community helping the poorest countries to integrate into world economy and reduce their isolation and poverty. As Sissako (2007) points out, “Poverty is not only about being hungry, it's about being humiliated on a daily basis.” Sissako wants the intellectual African to have a responsible voice and the continent to tell “its owned stories.”(p31)
The Constant Gardener identifies the corruption, exploitation and corporate greed of the multinational corporations with the appalling human cost in Third World where the drug firms use poor Kenyans to tests their drugs, even though the eventual beneficiaries of the medicine are those in the Western world. Nevertheless, as Calhouun(2007) points out , the film does not attempt a full investigation in identifying injustice, for instance, in a later scene of civil violence, when a remote village is attacked by a horseback army, the focus remains on the protagonist, Justin Quayle , and his dash to the helicopter and , as Calhouun states ,“The underhand and deadly behaviour of the pharmaceutical companies is never fully explained… so we leave the cinema with a stronger memory of breathtaking aerial shots of the beautiful desert than with any new insight into the scandal of drugs companies and Africa.”(p 34)
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Conversation (UNESCO) 2005, adopted a Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. The Declaration recognizes “That unethical scientific and technological conduct has had particular impact on indigenous and local communities.” It states “In applying advancing scientific knowledge, medical practice and associated technologies, direct and indirect benefit to patients, research participants and other affected individuals should be maximized and any possible harm to such individuals should be minimized.” The Constant Gardener brings attention to the violation of human rights in the name of scientific research and highlights the human suffering and the risks that are involved.
The narrative of the film compels the spectator into a gripping and authentic investigation into pharmaceutical corporations’ criminal operations. In the film's credits le Carré states “As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story it was as tame as a holiday postcard.” Fernando Miereles (2005) states that he included this quotation because he shares le Carré bleak view of the drug companies and read a couple of reports from Oxfam and watched a documentary “Dying for Drugs” by Brian Wood's and Michael Simpkins “It's really scary how these companies abuse their power.”(p10)
The film is an intrinsically dramatic espionage thriller which refuses to compromise the passionate political message at its essence. Its social conscience illuminates the recesses of the market forces, which are enthralled to the unbridled corporate greed of the multinational and Western governments. As Oxfam (2004) argues, it is imperative to hold multinational corporations accountable for their activities and to compel their ethical behaviour towards the social, environmental and economic contexts within which companies operate. Third World countries will offer favourable treatment including a minimum of red tape in a bid to induce corporations to set up operations in their jurisdiction. Hence multinationals feel free to engage in practices which they would not do in their domestic state.
The film takes place against a background of near colonial Africa and is filmed on location in Kenya. The opening scene of The Constant Gardener was filmed in one of Nairobi most impoverished communities in the slums of Kibera, a sprawling shanty town where people lived in makeshift huts in a labyrinth of raised pathways and sewage trenches. Much of the story takes place in the world of Africa and Kibera, where the colours are rich and saturated and have an earthy feel. Meirelles depiction of the crowded slums has resonance of the favellas of City of God. As Fernando Miereles (2005) states there was “the same spirit that I found in the faelas, such dignity.”(p10). The people are afflicted by an AIDS epidemic and have little in the way of social services or healthcare. The hard environmental conditions inspired the film's producer Simon Channing to set up a charity of social commitment “ The Constant Gardener Trust” in Kibera, building a bridge to allow easy access to the local health clinic and creating a school to provide full basic education around the villages. Patrons of the trust are Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, director Fernando Miereles, and John le Carré.
The location has an authentic sense of people and place and the superb cinematography brings much of the continent's beauty to the screen. In order to achieve true location Miereles films without the paraphernalia of a huge operation using minimal crew and equipment. (Fernando Miereles 2005 p 10).
The amazing beauty of vast and unpopulated landscape contrasts with the gloom and greyness of the Western environments of London and Berlin which seems to underscore the protagonist’s desperation and paranoia. The film swings back and forth from Africa to Europe. In Africa the Third World situation the environment is vivid, bright, warm and colourful, and very evocative and powerful with space to breathe, in Europe the colours are low contrast and dull people dressed in greys and blacks. One of the most unsettling and chilling images of evil is that of the grey men in suits. In the London, seen in flashbacks of the courtship of Tessa and Justin, the colours are warm and soft. The High Commission is lit by fluorescent lighting and has a corporate ambience. In a kitchen scene it is warm and African, steamy and bustling, it opens to the lobby of a formal drinks reception at Nairobi’s British High Commission where the wealthy austerity of the first world is austere, green and cold. The cinematography makes us a travel from African to European ambiance through the swing of the door from kitchen to lobby from the vista of a waiter's shoulder.
In the villages and markets of Kibera, the colours are warmer, redder. The beach by the lake where Tessa dies is rose coloured while the desert is orange, yellow and brown. In the final scene there is a warm rapturous shot of a formation of birds filling the sky with a suggestion of the reunion of lovers after death which creates a powerful sense of vitality and hope. A haunting sense of love lost and recovered. The director of photography Cesar Charlone (2005) states the colours in the film are the colours we found there only slightly enhanced”. (p24)The colours show contrastingly worlds.Meirelles brings to the screen much of the continent's beauty and the splendour of the African landscape has a dreamlike quality in its vast beauty and the vibrants of colour help our understanding of the difference in the cultures. When the scenes cut from London to Africa there is a cultural shock of different worlds and the compelled the authenticity of the narrative. The scene where Tessa asks goes to Africa cuts quickly to Kibera and has an astonishing effect of contrasting the culture and environmental and drives the narrative away from a predictable linear structure.
Justesen, (2007) points out “The globetrotting aspect of The Constant Gardener is as authentic as any movie can deliver.” The cinematography illuminates each location with difference. “The streets of London all shot in steel blue, while all the African occasion shots explode in hot yellow.” Each setting by means of its appearance expressed through the cinematography of its location, is able to elicit different and powerful feelings. (p2).
Plot
The film centres on a meek, mid level Foreign Office diplomat in Kenya, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) who has a passion for gardening and does not wish to challenge official collusion. During the film Justine is transformed to a man on an odyssey, on an existentialist journey in search of the truth about his wife's death, a dedicated political activist who is brutally murdered because of her determined campaign against multinational pharmaceutical companies, who were conducting experimental drug trials on unsuspecting African villagers. She goes on a fact-finding trip into the wilderness with Dr Arnold Bluhm an NGO activist. Tessa is found murdered in this remote area of Kenya. At first it is made to look like a crime of passion committed by Bluhm, the man she was supposedly having an affair with.
The narrative is played out in a series of flashbacks as Justin, a normally mild mannered man whose great interest is his garden and the nurturing of plants, tries to unravel the motives and events which led to his wife's death. The gardening is a powerful metaphor for the apathy of the developed Western countries for Third World poverty. Justin is haunted by remorse and devastated by grief as against advice he goes on a dangerous journey to find his wife's killers, and investigate the chicanery of the pharmaceutical industry. To uncover the truth of their conspiracy he must journey across two continents. The plot built around these symbiotic relationships is a KDH and the Three Bees Corporation
International murder mystery featuring Ralph Fiennes as naive husband and Rachel Weisz as the beautiful wife, murdered, but why? Show Weisz’s character, playing with children in Kibera slums, or insisting on having her baby in a Nairobi hospital to illustrate
Tessa volunteers to work as a health aide in a medical clinic but she pursues a hidden agenda.
Tessa is beginning to uncover a plot concerning the pharmaceutical trade and the commercial and diplomatic interests of the British government who have made arrangements with the local government to test a new unsafe TB drug using thousand of unsuspecting Kenyans as guinea pigs for the clinical drug testing. They arrangements are also assisted by international humanitarian aid agencies for the new drugs are dispensed through the United Nations clinics .
Until the moment he identifies the body of his wife Justin is a mild-mannered man but he is determined to discover the truth. He is pitted against a huge conspiracy which features powerful establishment figures the film operates in a series of flashbacks to sift through the clues to the murder.
Tessa had given birth to a stillborn son in a government run clinic where she sees Kilula, who has also just given birth, being a guinea pig in the drug trials. Kilula mysteriously dies in the hospital motivating Tessa's determined campaign even further. On the return journey
Tessa writes a report exposing the cover up of the patients’ deaths in the Three Bees clinic and tries to present their evidence to the United Nation but before she can do that her mutilated body and that of Dr. Arnold Bluhm are found near a lake in a remote area of Kenya.
Justin travels to find Kioko and is arrested and taken to the shabby, fly ridden police station where he is menaced and intimidated. He is released due to the intervention of the British authorities.
Justin becomes aware of the involvement of the Kenyan officials, British Intelligence and the Foreign Office, and suspense in the film builds as Justin travels between London, Kenya and Germany , always just one step ahead of his enemies. The plot focuses on many human rights issues and incites Justin to track down those who have caused Tessa's death and to discover the reasons. Justin becomes metamorphosed and is determined to track down his wife's killers against the bureaucratic web that corporate and government forces have woven. It becomes a Kafka labyrinth. As these journeys Justin acquires best understanding of his wife's activities and the motivations which inspired her courage. When he flies to London to see his high ranking superior, Pellerin he is warned not to “poking around under rock.”
Justin tracks down a letter which would expose the corporate corruption He becomes a target himself and his ultimately killed but not before he is able to lay plans to expose the conspiracy by leaking the documents to Tessa's cousin. These documents show the corruption, exploitation and human rights abuses by the multinational pharmaceutical industries against to the African poor and the complicity of British official.
In a London Cathedral at Justin's funeral, Pellegrin reads out eulogies of remembrance to Justin, but stating he died at his own hand because of grief from his wife's , Tessa’s death. When Pellegrin has finished Ham, Tessa's cousin, reads Pellegrin’s letter implicating the British government awareness of the potentially lethal drug tests and warning that public exposure of this knowledge could have damaging repercussions. These shocking revelations resound and underscore message of the film, of the moral imperative to pay attention to the human rights of the neglected voices of the Third World.
In the final scene of the film Justin sits beside Lake Turkana where his wife died. The sun is setting and Justin looks at the beautiful scenery feeling that Tessa is with him. He closes his eyes and as the gunmen approached there is a saturation of colour and a formation of birds fills the sky. There is a haunting suggestion of the reunion of the lovers after death, of the recovery of hope.
The film editor, Claire Simpson (2007) states that the editing process started in June 2004 lasting approximately nine months and that the structure of the film was the biggest challenge. “We tried many scene order variations, but it didn't quite click until we started with Tessa's death and then let the story unwind from there.” This gave the film its “conspiracy motivated thrust.The editing also created a challenge in the densely complicated plot “we didn't want to give the audience too much information at the beginning and let them get ahead of the film. It was a delicate balance in keeping the audience engaged in the story and maintaining clarity.
Criticisms and Controversy.
Though the The Constant Gardener is an Academy Award-winning film and the subject of positive reviews, some critics hold that the film missed in opportunity to the more focused and critical of the human rights abuses practiced by the pharmaceutical industry. It operates guilt from a safe distance and because there is considerable focus on the human drama it dilutes the political message and the practices and political interactions of the pharmaceutical industry remains curiously underexposed.
Sonya Shah (2000) held that The Constant Gardener was unrealistic and “a floored indictment of big Pharma`s complicity in African illness and poverty.” Michael Atkinson (2005) holds that the film concentrates on the smaller details pharmaceutical industry’s effect on Africa rather than focusing on “the ratio of its monstrous revenues to the paltry medical support it provides to Third World countries.” According to Make Trade Fair Oxfam International (2007), 1.42 billion people in Third World countries are denied access to necessary drugs because of the high prices which most people in developing countries cannot afford. This is the result of global trade agreements fixed by the World Trade Organization, which hold that every country grant 20 year patent protection for new medicines giving exclusive rights to companies to sell their patented medicines, which leads to a block on generic medicines which could be produced much cheaper. Though the pharmaceutical companies maintained that these patent
enforcements protects the research and development of new drugs there is little development and research pursued on diseases which a prolific in poorer countries. It is vital that the social and human rights responsibilities of the powerful pharmaceutical corporations be highlighted in order to save lives. Oxfam holds that the world trade organization must reform its rules on patents and that poor countries governments have the unambiguous right to obtain the cheapest possible life-saving medicines,” and have “ access to affordable generic medicines.”
One of the weaknesses of the film is the lack of substantial central African characters. Even
Dr. Arnold Bluhm, the black Belgian born in NGO activist from Medecins Dans l’Univers, suspected by the authorities to be Tessa's rapist and murderer even though he was gay a fact which is only revealed half way through the film to enable a change in the direction in the narrative plot . His character is not developed and appears to be a plot enabling tool. The other signifiers are corrupt African policeman and smiling African children.
There is no doubt that The Constant Gardener, is a well-liked political thriller positively received it tells its story superbly and with urgency and authentically and makes the spectator much wiser, taking him from his comfort zone. . The narrative of the film compels the spectator into a gripping and authentic investigation into pharmaceutical corporations’ criminal operations It is a memorable and absorbing film rooted in exposing injustice but some see the “romantic thriller” aspects of the story to be over focused, however by the narrative giving a human face to the abuses of the drugs companies it plays an importance part in exposing and bringing to popular attention the exploitation of the human rights abuses of multinational corporations in their operational organizations.
