PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/24/05)

City of God codirector Fernando Meirelles tries to bring the John le Carré–esque spy thriller into the 21st century with The Constant Gardener. It helps that he’s adapting, with screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, an actual le Carré novel, and that le Carré has found an apt replacement for the Russian Bear in the collusion of Western corporate and governmental forces. Here Ralph Fiennes plays a bookish diplomat whose feisty activist wife (Rachel Weisz) is murdered after she discovers a little too much about shady Big Pharma dealings in a suffering African country. The well-carved, flashback-laden structure keeps us guessing about quite a bit for a good stretch of the picture; once the plot enters the more familiar keep-your-head-down, travel with- a-fake-passport territory, we’re too hooked to mind the ensuing commonplaces all that much. With almost palpable anger, Meirelles hammers home the point that crushing poverty is only one problem for Africa that the West needs to do something about; cinematographer César Charlone’s visuals are heatsoaked and aptly stirring, and the cast (featuring stalwart character players Bill Nighy and Gerard McSorley, as well as the now much in-demand Danny Huston, whose self-assured menace here suggests a thinking man’s Tony Goldwyn) does yeoman work—although the ever-extraordinary Fiennes is the most quietly outstanding of the lot, miraculously showing us how his character literally ages with grief.—Glenn Kenny