As Provocative As A Kenneth Cole Ad

Summer ends with a wince courtesy of “The Constant Gardener,” a pretentious epic to kick-start the season of overrated Oscar-bait. Based on a globe-trotting political thriller by John le Carre and directed by Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), it has all the ingredients of a prestige picture deluxe: movie stars, exotic locations, pseudo-sophistication, political naivete, and a massive marketing campaign.Ralph Fiennes stars as Justin Quayle, a diplomat in the British High Commission assigned to northern Kenya. Rachel Weisz plays Tessa, his wife, an activist committed to uncovering the shady operations of a large pharmaceutical corporation. The movie begins with her death at the hands of bandits, but through extensive flashbacks we piece together the expected conspiracy. Skipping back and forth in time, we watch as a crushed, galvanized Justin investigates the “accident” and completes his dead wife’s righteous mission.Mr. Meirelles tells his story through overheated, undermotivated visual razzle-dazzle. A simple train ride to Berlin triggers an impressionistic, zoom-crazy spazz attack better suited to a Mazda commercial. The arrival of dark-skinned faces on the scene prompts a switch in film stock to something grittier – something a little more, you know, real. Cue propulsive tribal music.When it’s not trying to wow us with hyperbole, the movie settles for platitudes. In one memorably hackneyed sequence, Justin spends a wifeless afternoon in his cold, gray garden, remembering happy days with Tessa in all their warm, golden light. Such lazy visual ideas say a lot about the brain attached.Politically, “The Constant Gardener” is about as provocative as a Kenneth Cole ad. In the year of “Darwin’s Nightmare” and “Land of the Dead,” this expose of corporate caballing goes down like the blandest pap. News flash: Big pharma is self-interested! The screenplay, it should be noted, was written by the savant who penned “GoldenEye,” a mildly revisionist James Bond picture about Russian goons trying to undermine the world’s financial markets by satellite.Action! Tragedy! Romance! Style! Suspense! Africa! Outrage! “The Constant Gardener” does it all, insipidly. It’s a big movie with a lot on its mind, not least of which is convincing you it cares about anything other than furthering the career of its director. In the press notes, Mr. Meirelles claims he wanted to “take on some of the pharmaceutical industry,” and that as “a person from a developing country,” he felt he could “represent the Kenyans’ interests in the movie.” Please.Mr. Meirelles has about as much proletariat street cred as Sean “Diddy” Combs. Raised in a middle-class family, he received his university degree in architecture – power to the people! – before going into television. He quickly became one of Brazil’s most successful producers of commercials and promotional videos. This happy capitalist career is little remarked on by those who would hail Mr. Meirelles a champion of the disenfranchised, but it helps account for the soullessness of his style, his ease with formula and cliche, and his glossy packaging of Third World misery.It goes without saying that anyone committed to representing Kenyan interests isn’t likely to do so vis-a-vis John le Carre. That Mr. Meirelles followed up on the huge success of “City of God” with this sanctimonious middlebrow nonsense says everything you need to know about his ambitions: He gunned down the kids in the favelas so he could go gunning for Hollywood. It’s not his commercialism that infuriates, but the way he piggybacks it on a shameless exploitation of his Third Word credentials.Nevertheless, you’ll be hearing a lot of critical praise for this cinematic claptrap in the coming months, and for good reason: Critics helped create it. “The Constant Gardener” is what happens when a hack gets mistaken for a genius, and everyone believes the hype.The year I joined the New York Film Critics Circle, that bastion of critical complacency, we locked step with mainstream consensus in bestowing our Best Foreign Film award on “City of God.” By that point, the movie had earned many millions of dollars and reams of hysterical praise (“One of the best films you’ll ever see!” raved one of the nation’s most prominent critics). It would go on to be nominated for several Academy Awards, including a Best Director nod for Mr. Meirelles.Purporting to expose the ills of the Brazilian slums, “City of God” was, in fact, little more than a vivid, derivative gangster flick turbocharged with ghetto exoticism. The movie’s much-vaunted “style” – a high-contrast headache of choppy verite tricked up with digital enhancements – amounted to a ransacking of mainstream American action cinema. The driving sensibility was less “Pixote” than “Pulp Fiction.”Dazzled by the conviction of its nonprofessional hotties, the authority of subtitles, and an eye-popping blast of pungent local color, many viewers imagined themselves in the presence of something fierce and revelatory – “Los Olvidados” for the PlayStation generation. As callous, opportunistic entertainment goes, “City of God” was a real kick in the pants. As a “devastating” reminder that “the civilized society we take for granted is actually a luxury” (per the flabbergasted New York Times), it was about as trenchant as a Sunday Styles photo shoot in Sao Paolo.Argentine critic Quintin best summarized the position of the dissenters: “With no precise reference to contemporary Brazil, the film invites us to contemplate – from a safe distance – the terrible life of the slums, where poor people apparently kill each other with natural grace and wit.”In “The Constant Gardener,” the spectacle of noble, wretched, AIDS-plagued Kenyans provides a colorful backdrop for the story of a rich white bore snapping out of his stupor. You don’t leave the movie questioning the motives of big pharma, but evaluating Mr. Fiennes’s chance for a Best Actor nomination. Alas, he sleepwalks through the role, heavily relying on his worst fallback effect: a confused puppy grimace signaling great depths of manboy heartache.Ms. Weisz recovers from a preposterous early scene in which she rants about British culpability in Iraq, but fails to overcome the dramatic trappings of her reductive freedom fighter. Indeed, the whole movie is a kind of trap, baited with upscale fluff, just waiting to be sprung on armchair liberals, gullible critics, and every card-carrying, vote-dispensing member of the cinematic status quo.

As Provocative As A Kenneth Cole Ad

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