Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a look at THE CONSTANT GARDENER, a flick that will be one of the heaviest contenders for Mr. Oscar next Spring. No question about it.
Here is a film that is stylish and heartbreaking that is brilliantly directed, tells a great story with some fantastic actors at the top of their games. It's an easy contender for best picture, director, actor, actress as well as the technical awards. And if it won it'd deserve every ounce of plated gold it got.
The film is about a british politician in Africa (Ralph Fiennes) who loses his wife to an act of extreme violence. It's quite unspeakable what happens to her, really, which plays in brilliantly at different points in the film. From act one to act two to act three you view the lead characters completely differently, both the living and the dead and that's where the brilliance in this film lies for me, personally.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Fiennes' wife, Tessa, played by the gorgeous and lovely Rachel Weisz, is a very outspoken woman. Very politicized and seemingly without fear of the consequences of her digging into corporate dirt. Is this the reason for her death? Or is there something deeper? Or was it just a random, tragic event? Well, that's the question, isn't it?
Although Weisz' character is dead 3 minutes into the film, she has tons of screen time as we jump around in time. Director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine structure the film perfectly, each step in the plot giving us a slightly different perspective on both our lead characters until finally, at the end, you realize neither are what you thought they were. In Weisz's case pieces of the mystery surrounding her death are brought to light and in Fiennes' case his character actually changes due to the events unfolding before him.
It's a masterfully told story and one that surprisingly didn't rip my heart out and leave me devastated in the theater. Rather, that heartbreaking grew the more I thought about the film and how they pulled the rug out from under me as an audience member. They really got me good, making me feel guilty about judging certain characters without knowing much about them.
My immediate reaction was that THE CONSTANT GARDENER was this year's HOTEL RWANDA, but then I remembered that this isn't based on a true story. That's really a testament to how real the world that Meirelles creates is and how human and flawed the characters are. The writing and the performances all go to making this as real as possible, as gut-wrenching as possible.
This is the first real great "Awards" film of the year, but to label it only an "awards film" makes one think it panders to the academy, making wrong choices in the narrative or performances in order to inch that much closer to being able to say, "THE CONSTANT GARDENER, winner of BLANK Academy Awards." The film is it's own and every single step was taken to further the story of one man trying to fill that empty hole inside of him by finding out the truth behind his wife's murder, all the while coming to understand her more in death than he ever did in life.
It's a film I whole-heartedly recommend. Take your loved ones to see this and cherish them... then go tell all your friends about it.
-Quint
