June 17th, 2006
Not exactly along the same lines but reminded me of Red Dust that showed similar corruption and cover-up.
I found The Constant Gardener very powerful, the veins of symbolism settled into the subconscious. You would have thought that the title itself–”Constant Gardener”–is metaphorical clap-trap, but really it isn’t. Without saying too much when he starts raking his wife’s garden you realise how it’s going to end. Another piece of imagery that stuck in my head was the frantic kitchen scene that led out into the serene diplomat’s junket.
Ralph Fiennes was uncommonly good playing the stoic diplomat, with his kind of half-guessing at what was really going on. It’s nice to see another character who’s just embarking on a journey because of external influences, instead of just some abstract agenda: the difference between James Bond and Jason Bourne.
Anyway, enough trivialising the message through a review and some pontification about characters. You’ve either seen the film, going to, or not. I doubt what I say here will influence you because really–talk is cheap. Nowadays it’s considered uncool to become invested in some ideology, so arguing to see the film on a political level would no doubt be a fruitless exercise.
However I don’t give a damn. See this film because it gives you an insight into human nature–the nasty side we don’t like to see. When those adverts come on TV about how you can save the African Children for £2 a month, people no doubt most of the time flip the channel because they don’t want to become invested in the issue, or they already have a guilt complex, that so easily turns into resentment against the emotionally manipulative people who made the advert.
But really, most of the time people don’t even give the adverts the time to develop feelings of resentment, or cynicism about where the money actually goes. They just flip over because the problem’s “out there” somewhere. But indeed the cynicism itself could be just another way of making inaction justifiable.
Waiting until tomorrow would have been perhaps more sensible to write about the film, but then I’d lose what I felt when I looked at the little kid at the end waving his thumbs in the air at the camera. Right now I’m just spouting rhetoric, but perhaps when I read these words say 10 years from now, I’d hope that I can feel that I haven’t abstracted the sense of injustice away.