40in40 – The Constant Gardener
My Netflix rating: 2.5/5 stars
I didn’t like this movie. It hardly engaged me. My review will be short.
In my opinion, the story line of this movie was really just an overly complicated distraction from the more interesting piece: a unique convergence of the main character, Ralph Fiennes, and his late wife, Rachel Weisz. The whole “we need to stop the government from testing drugs on innocent Africans” thing felt so contrived. And it’s probably a real problem too! How annoying that the movie would bring up such an important worldly issue, but then skirt it for character development. And how much more annoying that it failed at both addressing the issue and then also at developing the more interesting storyline because it got caught up in the details. Tried too hard fail.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and make too much of the title, The Constant Gardener. It was the only part of the movie that really grabbed me and it was also a neat way of packaging both Fiennes’ and Weisz’s characters (see, their names in the movie are forgettable). A gardener does all he can to foster growth – he waters and feeds the plants, he removes the weeds, and he creates an overall fruitful environment. However, that’s all he can do. A gardener cannot force any growth and he cannot make anything happen. Who was the gardener in the movie? Well, Fiennes was, by hobby, a gardener. He tended to and cared for his plants and he actually looked after his wife in the same way. She was quite the wildflower and he did everything he could to support her individual growth. But as the movie progresses, we find out that the wife was also a gardener of her husband, protecting him from all the weeds that she had been secretly dealing with. So who was the gardener? I guess they both were, but in the end, I didn’t care.
I watched through this entirety of the movie in hopes of a quality ending (it does a fair job closing all its storylines). There were some parts that piqued my interest, but mostly I liked seeing how far our gardeners would go to protect each other. Through their actions and deaths, they were actually able to bear much fruit. That’s more than I can say about this flick.
“This is bandit country.” –Justin Quayle (aka Ralph Fiennes)
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