'Constant Gardener' targets a different 'axis of evil'

Ralph Fiennes has a peculiar kind of negative charisma. In his best performances, he commands the screen by deflecting attention, as though he wished the camera could hide him from our scrutiny rather than exposing him to us. It is hard to think of another movie actor who can be so convincingly shy, so protective of the psychological privacy of his characters.

In The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles' excellent adaptation of John le Carre's novel, Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose surname hardly suggests strength or decisiveness. Justin's main qualities seem, at least at first, to be diffidence, his interest in

gardening and a fumbling, self-effacing kindness. His words half swallowed, his features perpetually tinged with guilt, Justin is temperamentally unsuited to being the hero of a globe-trotting political thriller, which is part of why The Constant Gardener is an unusually satisfying example of the genre.

Another reason is that, unlike most other recent examples -- The Interpreter, Sydney Pollack's hectic and empty star vehicle for Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn comes to mind -- Meirelles' film actually bothers to say something about global politics. If what it says provokes some indignant rebuttal (be on the lookout for op-ed columns and public relations bulletins challenging its dire view of big pharmaceutical companies), so much the better. In pointedly applying Bush's phrase "axis of evil" to multinational corporations rather than to rogue states, the movie shows a willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion. This strikes me as noble, but it would also strike me as annoying if Meirelles were not such a skilled and subtle filmmaker, and if his cast were not so sensitive and sly.

There is more to the film than a twisting plot and a topical hook, and also more than visual bravura, colorful locations and fine, mostly British, acting. (Danny Huston is superbly creepy as Justin's two-faced friend and colleague, and the incomparable Bill Nighy shows a knack for soft-spoken villainy that makes you wish for a dozen sequels.) This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience. Which is only proper, since the theme of the film, as of Le Carre's novel, is the uneasy, divided conscience of the liberal West.

Fittingly enough for a man in his profession, Justin is a creature of moderation and compromise, apparently without strong views of his own. His young wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), is another story. They meet at a lecture Justin is giving on British foreign policy, after which Tessa angrily, tearfully challenges Britain's participation in the war in Iraq, as if embodying the caricature of people who hold such views as shrill hysterics. Her outburst, which clears the room, provokes an oddly sympathetic reaction in Justin -- a desire to comfort and protect this furious (and also very pretty) antagonist. For her part, Tessa finds something attractive about his solicitude, and his refusal to take offense. "I feel safe with you," she says after they make love for the first time, and he, without saying as much, clearly feels more alive with her.

But for most of the movie, which is an elegant origami of flashbacks and foreshadowings, Tessa is dead, murdered in the Kenyan wilderness, where she had gone with a Belgian doctor of African ancestry named Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Kound, who many in the Nairobi expatriate community assumed was her lover. In that cozy, gossipy world, where the habits of colonial rule seem to have adapted themselves easily to the requirements of do-gooder paternalism, Tessa was always something of a scandalous woman, puncturing the hypocritical politesse of cocktail parties with rude questions about money, power, poverty and disease. She preferred to spend her time -- usually in the company of Bluhm -- wandering through slums and villages, where, especially while pregnant, she cut a somewhat self-consciously saintly figure.