Stories never end, they are just abandoned. Nor do they start; only conveniently begun. So when a story is over, we forget it like we would an empty soda can. This is a sentiment at the heart of our literary and cinematic traditions.
In a film like The Constant Gardener, the sense of abandonment took form long before the main characters ever met, probably before they were born. Much of the movie is a long walk through the valley of despair, with hope as the elusive goal of this plaintive journey.
The film opens with a husband's concern for his wife's wellbeing. It then cuts to her sudden death in a vast African dessert. Her jeep is flipped over, wheels spinning. It's an eerie moment, unsettling as coming home to an intruder.
The husband is John, and his wife was Tessa. She's 24 and he's much older. The two had been in Africa as part of the British Diplomatic Service. He's there because it's his job, and she's there because she insisted.
John is a professional civil servant, a man who has spent most of his life repressing his emotions so he can be the proxy for his boss, speaking to audiences who are there only to heckle his employer. Tessa was very loud when she attended one of these speeches.
Tessa is wealthy by inheritance and has the luxury of being a political activist. She takes action where John prefers restraint and suffers from an inability to compromise. He works in his private botanical garden; she pulls weeds out of society.
Why these two are married is half the film's mystery. It's just there, a fact of the universe like gravity or Walmart. It's something John didn't understand either, not at first.
Structurally, the film is split into two parts. The first half is John's exploration of why his wife died, and the second is how he'll mourn her memory. As a whole, the film is the story of John's transformation from the detritus of his wife's tragedy.
Director Fernando Meirelles' freshman work, City of God, takes a guerilla approach to filmmaking, which is again utilized here. The cinematography is a careful cocktail of reflection and spontaneity -- Meirelles populates his scenes of African life with a vibrant and kinetic use of natural imagery. From this he weaves a rich tapestry of sound and color, of life against the odds of day-to-day reality and a western world whose interest in the continent is at best casual neglect.
The scenes of hope in even the bleakest shadows of poverty in the first half of the film disappear in the second. Here, the movie becomes unwaveringly cynical. As John unearths the cover ups of his wife's death, he is moved to complete the work she left unfinished. The film is shot with an almost-schizophrenic paranoia as the enemies that doomed John's wife close in. Colors are tinted with metallic grey, shots are grainy like a security video and everyday observations of strangers on the street take on a heightened and choking dimension of menace.
The film climaxes in the African dessert from the beginning, and concludes with a sad but redemptive irony unfamiliar in most of cinema today. There is likely no success in John's or Tessa's efforts to help those who have been abandoned and exploited by those most in the position to help them.
However, if film can be a kind of truth, then Gardener's point is to remember that we can change, and change can better us. Change begins when we realize that even if we can't help everyone, we make a difference in those we do. Individual compassion resonates more than society's collective apathy.
In the end, The Constant Gardener is an exploration in the best sense of the word. It looks far beyond the physical terrain of Africa and Europe, into the expanse of human emotion, taking us to those places where geography is much more than where we are on the map.
As we abandon our present excursion through the possibilities within this film, for reasons of time and marginal space, I hope many see this movie and that its memory takes root. Maybe not forever, but just long enough so that, when the film drops from their memories, it comes with the twinge which happens when we forget something important.
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