The wages of empire

Two films worthy of studying side by side: William Wyler's The Letter (1940) and Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener. Far from a great film, The Constant Gardener is nevertheless a gripping one, suggesting the ways in which bureaucracy and a crumbling sense of entitlement become indistinguishable from totalitarianism at its most invisible and omnipotent. Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself fighting a pharmaceutical company which treats AIDS-stricken Kenyans as laboratory rats -- a fight he was reluctant to pursue until his activist pain-in-the-ass wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is murdered by local thugs hired by said company.

Meirelles suggests that Quayle's relentlessness is in part due to his wife's considerable sexual magnetism (Weisz gives the film's best performance: fierce, sly, ironic) and not at all related to a repressed sense of justice. An unintended effect, I wager. The film's major flaw is that we never see Fiennes at work. He's supposed to be a diplomat but we get no sense of why he chose this profession (other than he's feeble and passive; not a complimentary view of the diplomatic corp, this) or what drives him other than he loved his wife. This doesn't detract from Fiennes' work. A pallid, wispy actor when called upon to project sincerity, he is entirely convincing as a man who accepts the fact that his life has changed inexorably, which makes Quayle kissing cousins with other Fiennes characters (his deformed count in The English Patient for starters).

In The Letter, Bette Davis' rubber plantation's wife offs her lover after he spurns her. She's so respectable that she can prepare breakfast for her lawyer, husband, and arresting officer minutes before being arrested (in Singapore the English ruling class stuck together). Like The Constant Gardener, Wyler's film shows the savagery into which hegemony sinks when it avoids accepting responsibility for its actions, as well as the effect on the natives hegemony's civil servants are purportedly educating. All these subtleties are apparent in Davis' performance. Pauline Kael was correct when she noted that Davis "gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history."