I left for town at two to catch the afternoon performance of The Constant Gardener. In many ways this was the perfect film. The photography was stunning. The film is set against the backdrop of the little known northern tracts of Kenya beyond Marsabit around Lake Rudolf and the Ethiopian and Sudanese borders. This wilderness setting is seen in sharp contrast to urban Nairobi where a high-rise Western-style downtown of Hilton hotels and imperial embassies jostles uncomfortably alongside Kibera, the largest squatter settlements in Africa with its poverty and Aids, its vibrant colours and tragic destitution. The film pulls few punches and you come out feeling you have been given a glimpse of true African reality.
The film has been put up for a whole raft of awards and there has been little attempt to sabotage its distribution. The same remark can be made about The Lord of War. This suggests a new policy. The basic John Le Carré plot is built around the murder of Rachel Weisz who plays a social activist on the trail of an evil drug company falsifying its research results to fast-track a new tuberculosis vaccine and save billions of research pounds by bringing the drug to the world markets three years early. Hundreds of poor impoverished Kenyans lose their lives and are buried in unmarked graves along the way. After Rachel gets herself murdered Ralph Fiennes her widowed husband takes up her cause and ends up dead as well.
So we have a dark plot in which both hero and heroine fail to make it to the end of the film...officially she is killed by bandits and he commits suicide. Christopher Booker would place the story squarely in the tragedy category...The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories...has a typical Le Carré twist in the tale in his portrayal of the British Government and their stupidity agencies in the conspiracy. The film’s ending is built around the Westminster Abbey memorial service where, from the pulpit, Rachel’s cousin reads out a top-secret letter from Bill Nighty...a Foreign Office diplomat who slinks away in his chauffeur-driven Daimler as the credits roll.
I read Le Carré’s book when it came out several years ago and this ending feels wrong...too neat and contrived. Suddenly the evil is not corporate but personal...a rogue diplomat to be dutifully scape-goated off camera later. Even the evil corporation gets its come-uppance. But Le Carré doesn’t sanitise his plots for the comfort of The Establishment. I must read the book again.
I have some concerns about proposals for the September conference. When I got home I dug out some early copies of Fourth World Review from 1985 and typed up the announcement of the fourth Fourth World Assembly in FWR nr.9...we are now on nr.136. ‘...this year our path has been wonderfully smoothed by the far-sighted generosity of Radhakrishna, the Secretary of The Gandhi Peace Foundation...cables: satyagraha, New Delhi'. There were to be eight forums: 1. Human Scale Economics; 2. Politics and Community Empowerment; 3. Communications; 4. Ecology and Bioregionalism; 5. Urban Life; 6. War, Non-Violence and Community Power; 7. Ethnic People and Decolonisation in Asia; and 8. Village Development.
Aah! Mr Gandhi and satyagraha...passive resistance or civil disobedience. In today’s one-world government by fear Mr Gandhi wouldn’t last five minutes. Nowadays assassination is done pre-emptively...and is a fully privatised service. Have you noticed the gaping flaw in the film script? Right. Bill Nighty Letters never get written. There are no smoking guns or deep throats...just walks in the woods and knowing nods exchanged over brandy after dinner at the club. The only paper trails are the ones laid for entrapment by the Stupidity Services.
Petra Karin Lehmann was born in Bavaria in 1947 and lived in the US from 1959 to 1970. She changed her name to Kelly after her mother married an American Army officer. She was educated in a Roman Catholic convent in Günzburg and attended high school in Georgia. An admirer of Martin Luther King she graduated from the School of International Service at the American University in Washington DC in 1970 and worked at the European Commission in Brussels from 1971 to 1983.
Petra Kelly was one of the founders of Die Grünen, the German Green Party. Between 1983 and 1990, she was a member of the Bundestag for the Greens. She received Jacob von Uexkull’s Right Livelihood Award in 1982 "...for forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights." In 1992 she was murdered in Bonn.
The Investigating Authorities decided her partner ex-NATO general Gert Bastian shot her and then killed himself. Nobody else believes a word of this official cover-up. In the words of her friend, the Dalai Lama: "Petra Kelly was a committed and dedicated person with compassionate concern for the oppressed, the weak and the persecuted in our time. Her spirit and legacy of human solidarity and concern continue to inspire and encourage us all." I wish! Actually she has been completely forgotten. It would have been nice if The Constant Gardener had been dedicated to Petra Kelly.
williamshepherd
Pro 
There are many plot changes between book and script...to the extent that the film does an effective job of vaccinating moviegoers against reading the book which has a wealth of interesting detail omitted from the film.
One key alteration is to remove the head of mission in Nairobi Porter Coleridge and focus the film on his Number Two Sandy and his direct line to Porter's boss Sir Peregrine. The High Commissioner doesn't play a big role in the action of the book...which makes him an obvious candidate for exclusion from the film script (directors don't think moviegoers can cope with too many protagonists).
However in the book John Cornwell attributes the successful closing down of the pharmaceutical distributor Three Bees to Porter's behind-the-scenes work [at Cabinet level in London] thereby validating Tessa's basic belief that change from within the system is possible...but only through men of integrity like Porter not by the Sandys and Peregrines of this world.
In his 2003 novel Next Michael Crichton cites a 2005 publication from Duke University Press in Durham, North Carolina as a useful source for information on Big Pharma:Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practice with Adriane Petryna, Andrew Lakeoff & Arthur Kleinman as editors.