The Constant Farmer...Gardener. Whatev.

My dear friend Erin has requested a review of The Constant Gardener. This is one of those movies I'd really, really be dying to see if I were a better person. But let's be honest...I just saw Munich and I'd still like to see Syriana, and that's about all the social justice/awareness and earnest concern for the state of the world that this girl's got in her for a month of movie viewing. The triple whammy would likely send me running for the nearest copy of Dodgeball pronto.

Anyway, The Constant Gardener stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz (both names I managed to spell correctly without looking up on IMDB first. Go me). Ralph Fiennes is some sort of political attache and his wife is a doctor who helps save dying kids in Africa. I would assume that she has more to do with preventing everyday afflictions like polio and rickets and less to do with exotic diseases like ebola and the hanta virus, since this movie doesn't look like Outbreak 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Anyhoo, she gets pregnant, but is killed before she has the kid, thereby denying Ralph his wife and his first born in a cruel twist of fate. He then proceeds to figure out who killed her and why. From what I can tell, she is killed because of some wide-reaching conspiracy between pharmaceutical companies and the US government. Warlords may also be involved...I'm not sure. But then again, where would a good conspiracy theory movie set in Africa be without a fair measure of warlords?

Overall, it appears that the movie makes a thoughtful (if obligatory) point about how intertwined American business, politics and the fate of the known world really are (see also: Syriana; the nightly news). The title probably refers to America's constant "gardening" or select cultivation of and tending to discontent in other parts of the world for its own benefit. That, or Ralph Fiennes has time to grow some mean tomato plants in the midst of unravelling an international conspiracy of the highest order.