The Constant Gardener (2005)

 

"You could learn me." -- Tessa asking Justin to marry her.

What a line! And over the course of the film he does, telling her spirit that he has finally learned all of her secrets.

Justin (Ralph Fiennes) and Tessa (Rachel Weisz) end up in bed together so quickly, I thought I was watching a porno for a second.

But that's before. The movie starts with the "end," I suppose, with "everything" before happening in flashback. The opening shot focuses on the backs of Justin, Tessa, and Arnold. Tessa turns around briefly to say goodbye. She touches Arnold's arm briefly, and but everything feels detached and unexplained. At this moment, we don't know who these people are, or what's about to happen. We've landed at this specific moment, and it's not in the linear timeline.

Justin is a very polite, very reserved British diplomat. Tessa is a woman who wants to make a difference in the world. When she asks to go to Africa with Justin, she offers to marry him as a way to make that happen. That doesn't mean she isn't in love with Justin. I assume she is. But it does mean she will be spontaneous and rather impulsive. And maybe, just maybe, she will agree to do one thing if it helps promote her agenda to do something else.

In Africa, we see her pregnant, the only white woman walking around the slums of, I assume, Nairobi. She has a local guide with her, and she doesn't seem be under threat, but the beginning of the movie stays in the back of our minds. This is a dangerous place for her to be. She's putting her life on the line, and the life of their unborn child.

Her guide and friend is Dr. Arnold Blume (Hubert Koundé). Does she like him? He likes her. We see them walking through the slums, and he shows concern for her. He tells her that if she was his wife, he wouldn't let her be working here, even if he had to tie her to the bed. "And then what would you do, Doctor?" she asks. "That's another story," he replies. It's playful flirting and maybe they mean nothing by it, or maybe they do? At this point, we don't know for sure.

She's pregnant, but Justin is suspicious. I guess so are we. It's funny how quickly the movie can make us question her motives and her fidelity, maybe even before her husband does.

She has an explanation for why she and Arnold were at the Hilton together, and that seems to relieve his suspicions, but then a second later, after telling Justin that "I like you the way you are," she floats the idea of naming their son Arnold, saying "It would be such a nice gesture." You can see from the look on his face that he's immediately suspicious once again. Is he scared of losing her? Did she enter his life too easily that he worries she could leave it just as easily?

Tessa is an extravert and very gregarious. Justin is the opposite. As we watch her at a party, we start to wonder if his jealousy goes deeper than Arnold. Would he like it better if she stayed hidden away somewhere? It made me even think of Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" whose speaker would prefer that his wife's look didn't go "everywhere." One of his colleagues, Sandy (Danny Huston) even pointedly tells Jason that his wife and Arnold are too pushy lobbying for their agenda at the party, and that he should control her better or have her "locked up."

The camera catches a brief moment of Arnold and Tessa at the party. She looks deep in thought, but he is staring admiringly at her. Is it possible that he is attracted to her in a way non-professional way and Tessa doesn't even notice -- or selectively chooses to ignore, assuming Arnold understands that's she's both pregnant and married and therefore unavailable? That's the intention of the shot. We see what we see, and we draw the natural conclusions.

What do we think we see? Tessa engages in harmless flirting. We see her do it with Sandy, too. She apparently doesn't take it seriously. She's a beautiful woman, and maybe she just "goes along" with things. If men hit on her, it's easier just to "go with the flow." If it's just words, it doesn't mean anything to her. For her, if it were "serious," she'd act on it, as she did with Justin. Anything else is just one of the "harmless games" humans play. This may be how we're supposed to process Tessa's character, but for Justin, he sees even less than what we see as viewers, and so he has even less information to help him process what's going on with Tessa and their marriage.

As the movie unfolds, it becomes even more clear that the "men" in Tessa's life do what she wants because they're attracted to her. Tessa loses her child in childbirth at a provincial hospital. It was her choice to have the child there rather than a better, more modern facility. Justin, Arnold, and Sandy are all there, and she asks Justin to go for a water so that she can talk to Sandy alone. Sandy seems to think she wants to talk about "them," but what she wants is for him to help a young girl in the hospital who is in trouble. Apparently, she and Arnold do have secrets, as they work to help girls like this behind Justin's back. Now she's brought Sandy into her plans, and he promises to help. Not because he wants to, but because Tessa's face and her smile can prompt him to do about anything.

Justin is so reserved. He eventually "confronts" Tessa, asking her to stop doing whatever she and Arnold are doing together. That's all he says, and she thinks he's referring to the work they are doing behind his back; he, of course, is talking about the personal intimacy he thinks they're engaged in. Her "admission of guilt," then, confirms something to Justin, but it's the wrong thing. Even when she reminds him that they had an "agreement" that he not interfere with her work, he seems tone deaf. Each is having a conversation about something else.

That said, maybe Tessa actually will use sex to get what she wants? She makes a "deal" with Sandy, but to her perhaps it's simply transactional. She wants to know what has been written about her in a "personal letter," and she's willing to buy it with her body. Sandy accepts the deal, acknowledging that it could "ruin his career" if it ever got out that he showed her the letter.

From there, Arnold and Tessa get onto the plane. This scene is the same one at 41 minutes into the film that we saw at the beginning of the film. Why repeat it? Why show this moment at the beginning? Because we need to know the killing of Tessa has already happened. It's not a new piece of information. We know it from the beginning. What we have left to learn is who's responsible, and who Tessa really was. Was she the woman Justin wanted her to be, or was she someone he's only started to suspect she is?

The story continues. The accepted narrative is that random thieves killed her and the driver. The police, however, ransacked Tessa's home office, taking files and hard drives. Why?

In a box of personal items, Justin finds a love letter from Sandy, begging Tessa to return the letter and/or run away with him. So, she kept the letter that Sandy allowed her to see, and it also sounds like she never "gave herself' to him for the letter as she promised she would?

On top of that, why did she "save" this letter? As a plot device, Justin needs to find it, but under any normal circumstances, it seems like something that Tessa would have logically read and immediately destroyed. Unless she wanted it found? The letter was in a box of personal items that only Justin would have looked through. Is she communicating a message to her husband from beyond the grave? Not one of her guilt, but one of Sandy's. A clue to her killing?

Sandy, meanwhile, must be upset not only that Tessa is dead, but also that the police may have confiscated the letter he had wanted returned. Or, is it possible that Sandy orchestrated Tessa's murder? We still don't know the full story. It seems unlikely that Sandy wanted Tessa killed, but he does appear to be guilty of something.

The first half of the film, then, is a story of Tessa, the men in her life, and the jealousy that Justin feels. From there, however, Justin continues to learn about Tessa.

No, Tessa wasn't having an affair with Arnold (he's gay). Whatever she was involved in with Sandy might have been what ultimately got her killed.

As he digs deeper into things that it would be "better for him not to pursue," it becomes clearer that the Drug Company worked with a Testing Service -- thus explaining the phrase "marriage of convenience" he had overheard Tessa say to Arnold. This is about big money and the people who don't want the inconvenience of someone more interested in what's best for the people of Africa.

Pretty obvious that moneyed interests had Tessa killed, and that she did dearly love Justin, but Justin obviously won't rest until he finds the evidence he needs to link Tessa to her killers. Eventually, he does obtain the evidence he needs, sending it off to a Tessa's trusted cousin, while he goes in the opposite direction, prepared to sacrifice himself so that the truth that Tessie wanted to expose comes out.

Will the "whistleblowing" matter? The movie ends on the note that it will. Am I so cynical that I'm left wondering? Will the evidence actually stop the testing of drugs on human guinea pigs in Africa? That's beyond the scope of the movie. What matters is, Justin now completely understands Tessa and what she was willing to give her life for. He has become more like Tessa, willing to give his own life to her cause as well.

I like the first half of the film more, but probably because I'm interested in Tessa and her relationship with Justin. The second half is necessary, to unravel the mystery, but the second half "reveal" may actually be 2/3s of the movie. That's a little uneven on balance. But like I say, I want more Tessa, so I wish the first half was longer.