Constant Gradener by John Le Carre'

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Le Carr� film wins critical acclaim

Le Carré film wins critical acclaim

Patrick Barkham and Sophie Kirkham
Friday September 2, 2005
The Guardian


Cinematic success has not come easily to John le Carré since Richard Burton won an Oscar nomination for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. From The Russia House to The Little Drummer Girl, few of the 74-year-old author's bestselling thrillers have made an acclaimed transition to the screen, although Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy became a BBC television classic.
But 40 years after his biggest film hit, Le Carré is savouring the prospect of a commercial and critical triumph with his five-year-old novel The Constant Gardener, which has been made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.

An excoriating account of the corrupt practices of pharmaceutical companies and complicit western governments in modern-day Africa, the film was directed by the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, nominated for an Oscar for City of God, his account of street life in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
Opening in the US this week, it has met with a rapturous reception.

"This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience," said AO Scott in the New York Times.

"A blistering drama that is positively electrifying," said the New York Observer.

Ain't It Cool News, the influential online film site, has made it its film of the year.

Le Carré has never written the screenplays of his novels and some critics have suggested his intricate thrillers do not transfer easily to cinema screens.

The Constant Gardener has been tackled by Jeffrey Caine, whose screenwriting career began with Bergerac and Dempsey & Makepeace before he became a co-writer on one of the more successful films in the Bond franchise, GoldenEye. Last year he wrote the screenplay for Inside I'm Dancing.

Le Carré's novel tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat in Nairobi, who unravels a pharmaceuticals company conspiracy while investigating the murder of his wife, Tessa, a political activist.

Told through a series of flashbacks, what emerges is the love story between the couple set against an international drugs scandal.

There is already talk of Oscar nominations for Fiennes and Weisz, who lead a cast which includes Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite.

The British producer, Simon Channing Williams, a longtime collaborator of Mike Leigh, wrote to Le Carré before the novel was published in 2001 to ask for the film rights.

He believes one of the keys to making the film work was to not try to remain slavishly faithful to the book, but to make a film in its own right.

"I felt it was an immensely important book and wonderfully angry, and I was determined that it should be done by a British producer rather than a US studio," he said.

He also paid tribute to Caine, whose wife died shortly before he began work on the screenplay: "There was this amazing empathy from this man who had lost his wife who was writing a story about a man who had lost his wife, and he did a fantastic job."

Le Carré has praised the end result and told American journalists this week: "Unusually in anything of mine that I've watched being made, [The Constant Gardener] acquired its own heart and its own truth.

"It's pretty rare with a movie where you suddenly, just for a moment, feel you're putting your hand on somebody's heart, and I had that feeling ... I really couldn't put a cigarette paper between my imagining of the Ralph Fiennes part and the way Ralph played it."

The Constant Gardener, which has been tipped to win the Golden Lion prize at the Venice film festival, opens in the UK on October 7 and will open this year's London Film Festival on October 19.