The Constant Gardener (DVD)

This is a worthy piece of beautifully shot film-making with an especially subtle portrayal given by the male lead. It's unarguably a good thing that The Constant Gardener educates us all about the shady work done in Africa by multinational companies, but this film fought shy of tackling the real issue- what if anything should realistically be done about it. The actors were let down by an inconclusive and unlikely plot (the film's a heavily adapted version of the novel), that presents a wholly inexplicable match between a conservative British diplomat and an attractive and rich young woman whom everyone except the diplomat can easily spot is about to naively get herself in real trouble attacking vested interests abroad with links to the British government. The film is plotted as though the 1960s never happened and resistance to multinational crime is still at the stage of lone voices heroically but wholly ineffectively trying to present the truth to power (bizarrely in this film in which the British government are implicated, the heroine dies trying to report a pharmaceutical abuse to the very government who are complicit in the abuse). That said, one point the film did make very well is how impossible it is to save even one life in the context of endemic disadvantage and lawlessness as it exists in Africa - the remark is made as one child is thrown off a life-saving 'plane, "it's how things are in Africa". If this film had dealt more deeply with those complexities it would have had greater logical consistency, but it probably also would have been less palatable to its target audience.

This is an angst-ridden film about Africa told almost entirely from a white upper-middle class persepctive. The film-makers set up a charity as a result of making it and say their director really understood the plight of all those Africans who serve as voiceless landscape in its background. In sum, this film is colonial but aspires to some form of post-colonial complexity that it just hasn't thought through. It does make you think though, but ultimately mostly about how rich and privileged you'd have to be to really think this kind of message was going to "save" Africa. The thing about guilt is, it's not an end in itself. Ultimately it's self-serving unless it's rigourously used to plot out a workable response for change.