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The Constant Gardener
Metascore
82 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 39 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 37 out of 39
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 39
  3. Negative: 0 out of 39
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  1. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Robert K. Elder
    100
    A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.
  2. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    100
    Simply the best adaptation of any John le Carré thriller to make it to the screen.
  3. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    100
    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.
  4. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    100
    A masterwork of suspense, romance and political intrigue.
  5. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    100
    A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.
  6. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    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.
  7. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    91
    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.
  8. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    91
    Essentially two movies for the price of one. But those halves add up to more than most movies right now.
  9. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    91
    Reigns as the most assured, provocative film so far this year.
  10. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Greg Bellavia
    90
    The film is able to be a thriller, a political statement and a haunting romance all at once.
  11. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Ken Tucker
    90
    Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances.
  12. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    90
    A film that grips us dramatically, intellectually and emotionally.
  13. Slate
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    90
    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.
  14. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marrit Ingman
    89
    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.
  15. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    88
    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.
  16. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    88
    A slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget.
  17. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    88
    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.
  18. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    80
    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.
  19. Empire
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    80
    Serious, topical filmmaking of a very high order. It may not engage as immediately as a Bourne, but it sticks with you longer.
  20. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    80
    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.
  21. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    80
    A smart, beautiful piece of storytelling, attentive to Le Carré's broad intent, while boldly taking a knife to his more egregious longueurs.
  22. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michael Atkinson
    80
    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.
  23. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    80
    This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.
  24. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    80
    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.
  25. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    80
    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.
  26. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    80
    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.
  27. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    80
    Fernando Meirelles stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston.
  28. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Connie Ogle
    75
    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.
  29. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    75
    Deadly serious about its message: that the West is just as vicious and corrupt as Africa.
  30. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Talky and intelligent, and never takes the cheap way out. It's also something of a downer.
  31. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    75
    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.
  32. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    75
    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.
  33. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    70
    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.
  34. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    70
    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.
  35. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: Anthony Lane
    70
    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.
  36. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    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.
  37. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    63
    Constant is the very thing The Constant Gardener is not. Attractive yet fickle, the movie beckons enticingly one moment and wanders off the next.
  38. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Melissa Levine
    60
    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.
  39. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Jim Fusilli
    50
    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.
    All this publication's reviews
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User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
6.9 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 223 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 86 out of 137
  2. Mixed: 16 out of 137
  3. Negative: 35 out of 137
  1. MennoV.
    9
    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!
  2. DanS.
    9
    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.)… Full Review »
  3. Riren
    3
    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.… Full Review »
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