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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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79
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You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Constant Gardener, The

Universal acclaim
Based on 39 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 208 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Jeffrey Caine
John Le Carré
Directed by: Fernando Meirelles
Release Date:
Theatrical: August 31, 2005
DVD: January 10, 2006
Running Time: 129 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / UK
Summary
RATING: R for language, some violent images and sexual content/nudity
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, and Archie Panjabi
Adapted from the novel by John le Carre, this is a gripping romantic thriller that sweeps audiences along one man's emotional and global journey to uncover the truth behind a personal loss and a worldwide conspiracy. (Focus Features)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: City of God
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Simply the best adaptation of any John le Carré thriller to make it to the screen.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder
A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
It's a love story only in passing. And yet the love story is what lingers in the mind and gives energy and meaning to everything that happens on-screen.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Essentially two movies for the price of one. But those halves add up to more than most movies right now.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Reigns as the most assured, provocative film so far this year.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Greg Bellavia
The film is able to be a thriller, a political statement and a haunting romance all at once.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A film that grips us dramatically, intellectually and emotionally.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
Substantive and imaginatively filmed but is not an off-putting art movie; rather, it's the kind of solid but accessible filmmaking that prevailed in Hollywood's golden age.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Cinematographer Cesar Charlone, whose burnt-orange view of the favela made "City of God" striking, conveys Africa's slums with equal force in somber browns and simmering yellows. At times, the inhabitants seem to be on fire in their surroundings, a fitting image for a land consigned to a hell of unhappiness.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
A slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine put a human face on John le Carre's novel of sex, lies and dirty politics in modern Africa. Prepare for a thrilling ride.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
His (Fernando Meirelles) impressionistic, guerilla style of filmmaking works surprisingly well in capturing the hypnotic urgency of le Carre's fiction. And his viewpoint is less British and more Third World.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Succeeds in capturing the book's essential themes and concerns, albeit in a hectic style that could not be more antithetical to that of the literary master of international intrigue.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
A smart, beautiful piece of storytelling, attentive to Le Carré's broad intent, while boldly taking a knife to his more egregious longueurs.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Fernando Meirelles stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Michael Atkinson
Although le Carré's story may seem predictable and unduly focused on the plight of a pale, wealthy Old Worlder adrift in a sea of needy East Africans, the movie's human material is masterfully manipulated.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
One of the best elements in the adaptation is Caine's blending, like le Carré's, of the past and the present so that one can enrich the other. There are no stilted flashbacks: both past and present are treated as present, which gives the film a texture of depth.
Read Full Review >Empire Staff (Not credited)
Serious, topical filmmaking of a very high order. It may not engage as immediately as a Bourne, but it sticks with you longer.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
The Constant Gardener is difficult to watch, literally. Meirelles' lens leaps and jitters too much, as if it's anxious it might be bludgeoned to death, too.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Fernando Meirelles's MTV-grandstanding worked for "City of God," but it's just not necessary for, and gets in the way of, a script this literate and solid. In the end, The Constant Gardener works in spite of, not because of him.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Deadly serious about its message: that the West is just as vicious and corrupt as Africa.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
With almost palpable anger, Meirelles hammers home the point that crushing poverty is only one problem for Africa that the West needs to do something about.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Talky and intelligent, and never takes the cheap way out. It's also something of a downer.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Think about it a day later, though, and its hectic swoop from romance to thriller to campaign manifesto leaves oddly little afterglow. The gardener is the only constant here; so much else burns up and blows away.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Fiennes is the perfect John Le Carré hero: reserved and sophisticated, possessing the driest of wits, yet deceptively passionate in a way that people never really anticipate from him.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Rather than trading le Carré's downbeat but agonizingly true-to-life ending for something more palatable, Meirelles has crafted a rare sort of thriller that refuses to resolve real-life issues for the sake of feel-good entertainment.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Constant is the very thing The Constant Gardener is not. Attractive yet fickle, the movie beckons enticingly one moment and wanders off the next.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
Most of The Constant Gardener is made with good taste and with respect for its African subjects. But when Fiennes flees a Kenyan village as bandits begin their merciless attack, it's hard not to feel a little uneasy with the medium. We're meant to get a thrill out of the chase, but it's not thrilling. Sickening's more like it.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Jim Fusilli
In the end, The Constant Gardener is hardly more than yet another study of white, upper-middle-class martyrdom rather than the hard look at third-world suffering it might've been.
What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 208 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Menno V. gave it a9:
Impressive movie, though a bit slow to start. Excellent casting, very good camerawork. It's been a while a movie sucked me in this deep!
Dan S. gave it a9:
John Le Carre was by far my favorite narrator of how the Cold War corroded the humanity of everyone involved. The screen adaptations of his novels of those times, starting with the brilliant "Spy Who Came In From The Cold", showed clearly how most involved lost their idealism along the way...if they ever had any. They also explored so well about why and how decent people betray friendships and even love. "The Constant Gardener" tells us how far a huge pharmaceutical company will go to make more profits and, in any case, to cover up unethical, illegal practises when they go wrong. It has similar themes to Le Carre's earlier tales. The film was especially well-acted, with Fiennes and Weisz at their finest, while the cinematography and intelligent dialogue added a lot. Yet, I'm not surprised that the viewers gave this an average score of only 6.7, lower than the 82 by the critics. The basic premise of the tale is that the large pharmas will go so far as to murder those who are attempting reveal the cover-up. "Big pharma" these days have few fans outside Bush's White House, but it's really hard to imagine that they are up to assassinating those they fear. That's really seems to go too far. Yet, I can't bring myself to give this one a score of less than 9. Maybe it's because of Rachel Weisz, my nominee for the thinking man's heart throb. Maybe, like Le Carre, I'm just a sentimental old lefty. So I just can't help myself: "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (Evil to him who evil thinks.)
Riren gave it a3:
International pharmaceutical companies have been exploiting poor Africans in need of medicine for decades in order to test their drugs, regardless of their potentially crippling or lethal side effects. If the preceding sentence interested you, read a book about it. Don't see this movie. It's neither informative, nor an actually good film. The first half hour is a nearly incomprehensible exercise in flashbacks and flash forwards, setting up a disconnected chronology to excuse all the later scenes in the film from having to occur along a realistic timeline. It works with the naivety of an action movie, but reaches insultingly for the depths of a conspiracy movie, and comes away with the satisfaction of neither. It decomposes into sentimental trash by the end, with its great cast’s highly sympathetic acting jobs being thoroughly abused by sloppy editing and very poor direction. The use of manic cinematography decreases your attention span, doing no service to the plot’s slow burn – and despite it being slow, relationships between nearly all of the characters are left horribly confusing. After you realize you spent the first forty minutes of this movie just to get back to the beginning of the plot, and still have another hour and a half to go, you'll realize the half-baked melodramatic romance (which sees the main characters go from fighting at a lecture to bouncing in bed within five minutes of screen time) and bitter pseudo-realism wasn't worth the price of the ticket or DVD. Worst of all, this movie about the abuse of Africa's sick is about pretty people - the drama is foreigners running from terror, or children in peril, or the excess of the rich, with little more than ten seconds of screen time for any character who is actually stricken with T.B. or HIV. The lack of screen time for the actual suffering in the subject matter is the worst fault of a film that is pretty much exploiting that atrocity to give guilty-feeling non-Africans some catharsis. In the end, you can blame all the evils of the world on corporations and bureaucracy, but you can't blame them for this being a bad movie.
Judith H. gave it an8:
A good, rather than a great film, but I'm surprised few people have mentioned the novel. There were some strange decisions made in the adaptation, such as NOT including Lara, the beautiful Russian scientist. And now I've typed that I can see why not - it sounds too James Bond.
Mike R. gave it a0:
This was the SLOWEST MOST BORING movie I have ever seen. If you didn't see the movie I'll save you two hours. Drug companies are bad. There that's it, that's all the movie had to say. Terrible movie.
David H. gave it a5:
Le Carre's most disappointing book turned into a disappointing film. Odd collection of villains, some nice scenery, and a couple of pretty actors brooding.
Loildo T. gave it a9:
Great Movie, unquestionably! But, of course, this kind of movie requires maturity and patience, as for most interesting things.
