A killer plot

Reviewed - The Constant Gardener: Fernando Meirelles' international hit City of God established the Brazilian as an extraordinary director of action and chaos. But the buzzy pandemonium of that film - and, unfairly, the knowledge that its maker came up through advertising - promoted the suspicion that Meirelles might best avoid quieter stories.

The brilliant opening act of The Constant Gardener, in which Ralph Fiennes's introverted diplomat falls for Rachel Weisz's impulsive political activist, puts the lie to that theory. Using cuts that jump but never jolt, and a cautious colour palette (damp blue for London; rusty, sandy reds for the shantytowns of Nairobi), Meirelles seduces viewers even as he presents suggestions that something sinister is brewing.

We are, in fact, heading towards a death foretold. The first scene sees Justin (Fiennes) waving Tessa (Weisz), his wife, onto an aeroplane bound for the Kenyan interior. Soon after she is found murdered beside a remote lake.

After flashing back to the couple's courtship, the film devotes itself to Justin's attempts to discover the truth behind Tessa's death. His sinister colleagues at the High Commission - one division of a mighty Them that sponsors all evil in the film's universe - believe that she was slain by a supposed lover. Justin soon learns that his wife's investigations into the dubious practices of a large pharmaceutical company may have brought her in the way of danger.

The relationship between Justin and Tessa - a warmer version of that between the central couple in David Hare's Plenty - is immaculately well played. There is nobody better than Fiennes at leaking out little bits of emotion through curtailed gestures and facial tells. Weisz does an equally fine job selling us a character whose concern for humanity as a whole sometime leads her into disregard for those closest to her.

These and other fine performances combined with Meirelles' incomparable gift for working with locations - passing citizens are sometimes lured into taking brief speaking roles - help deliver a conspiracy thriller which, though utterly contemporary, blends mainstream drama with auteur flair in a manner rarely seen since Alan Pakula's films of the 1970s.

Unfortunately the picture, adapted too faithfully from John Le Carré'snovel, does get overly tied up with detail in its later stages and it ultimately becomes hard to care about who sent which e-mail to which official at what time. But the broad sweep of the story and the brilliantly rendered texture make for consistently gripping viewing.