The Constant Gardener, adapted from the literary thriller by , is the most idiotic and irritating political melodrama since Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Although a straightforwardly crusading effort, (1993), in which the wife of a similarly mild-mannered protagonist is also murdered for reasons having to do with the testing of new product by a pharmaceutical company. By figuring out who killed their wives, both the constant gardener and the fugitive turn into traditional truth-seeking romance heroes.
The Fugitive is an uncomplicated, if lumbering, melodrama in which the hero's best friend and colleague () is unmasked as the man who has suppressed negative trial results in order to bring a problematic drug to market and then framed the hero for his wife's murder to prevent exposure. It's a dopey premise: apparently the villain thinks he'll get richer faster by rushing past bad results, but at the expense, surely, of exposing the company and himself to potentially ruinous liability. In any case, the moviemakers did not imagine they were making an important statement about pharmaceutical companies and so had the good sense to include lots of action high points and to build up the role of the U.S. marshal chasing the hero so that in the role could entertain even those bored by the story.
By contrast, The Constant Gardener is intended as an impassioned indictment of the testing of drugs on poor Africans?in order to receive any medical attention at all they have to "consent" to treatment with unproven drugs, some of which have lethal side-effects. The pharmaceutical companies aren't working alone, however, but in collusion with the diplomatic wing of the British government and the enforcement power of the Kenyan government. The key to the political inflation of the melodrama is the fact that the wife is not just an unfortunate bystander, as in The Fugitive, she's an activist working to expose the nefarious doings of all parties.
John Quayle (), a diplomat who is quaintly obsessive about gardening, meets his wife Tessa () in London when he gives a speech in the stead of his higher-up and she stands and delivers a rambling, clich?-filled rant against the current Iraq war. Tessa's grandstanding is of a kind I've witnessed countless times in my bicoastal academic career?the party may see herself as Joan of Arc but it's hard to imagine what she thinks she's accomplishing. Tessa is somewhat abashed afterwards, but then later, once she has married Quayle and followed him to his post in Kenya, she purposely asks embarrassing questions of one of the conspirators at a cocktail party and it's clear the movie considers her heroic. Tessa is, in fact, the model after which Quayle, awakened by her murder, remakes himself into a hero, and Whether or not doing so could conceivably have any effect, I presume.
The movie can't be considered a guidebook on how to expose drug companies' bad behavior because for the most part all Tessa does is speak up. She does write a report as well but then, like the kind of fool the melodrama requires her to be, she doesn't publish it but seduces one dirty guy into sending it on to one of the top guys in the conspiracy. (How valuable can her report have been if she didn't even figure out who was involved in the evildoing? We can't judge because the movie doesn't risk boring us with its contents.) Tessa does not form an organization, and you have to wonder, Why should a businessman or politician respond to what every overheated person says to him at a cocktail party or in a "report"? They would in this instance, of course, if they had the privilege we have of seeing the holy light of truth shining off Tessa. But they're benighted and so Quayle takes up Tessa's sword against them and becomes a man, not in realistically contemporary terms but in the venerable terms of chivalric romance.
Romance has its allure, of course, and . But the ambitions overfreight the story and the actors practically grunt with the effort of making it all at once judiciously novelistic, overripely sexy, throbbingly romantic, and morally exalted. The political ambitions of le Carr? and are quite insistent, but the story feels like a story, not like the truth?it's both far-fetched and predictable. For instance, governments and corporations in The Constant Gardener operate with nightmarishly perfect synchronization. They not only hold together a coalition to work out the hitches in a potential blockbuster drug on the "expendable" population of sub-Saharan Africa, but when Quayle starts investigating his wife's murder they track him down no matter where he goes in five countries on two continents, even using a fake passport. They know, they see, they arrive. (And he, with his own convenient foolishness to match his late wife's, enters his German hotel room even though he hears a TV set playing that he hadn't left on.) The paranoia isn't even stimulating as it was in , for example, because the makers don't think of themselves as paranoid.
The Constant Gardener at least has the advantage of Meirelles's distinctive temperament. He has a photographer's eye but throws spectacularly "grabbed" shots on the screen in jaggedly rhythmed series and at times gets this art-house entertainment beyond the museum-quality pictorialness of David Lean's or Anthony Minghella's big-literary projects. In this 15 September 2005 CNN.com article , Meirelles says that he and never storyboard their scenes, preferring to shoot them on the go with a small, handheld camera. Meirelles gets the virtue of this method just right: "The camera is never in the perfect position, and I think this is what keeps this feeling of reality. The frame is not perfect." Meirelles and Charlone's imagery shows the world through the eyes of men so agitated by what they're seeing that .
It's a style peculiarly suited to (2002) in which the seductiveness of criminality for the teeming hordes of poor children in Rio de Janeiro practically unseats your reason. How can you live in a world in which this goes on, decade after decade after decade? The formal exhilaration of Meirelles's imagery gives you some perspective on these structureless lives tending inevitably downward, and because photography provides a way out of poverty and crime for the young hero (as it does for the kids in the documentary (2004)), the movie suggests the power of vision.
Finally, however, City of God is more like a Warner Brothers gangster movie such as (1931) that show you hoods headily rushing down the slide to hell than it is like the full-grained neorealism of (1946). City of God is even more brutally matter-of-fact about the pleasures of sociopathic self-assertion than a Cagney picture, and it has a destabilizing aesthetic excitement that the American gangster movies of the '30s lack, and none of the unconvincing piety of (1938), for instance. But Meirelles is almost too excited?his script can't quite account for the thrill he's transmitting to us with his depiction of these deplorable situations. (Martin Scorsese's (1990) has a similar disconnect.) The events in City of God have been shaped on the outside but not on the inside.
Meirelles's style is a robust but crude expressionism, which in The Constant Gardener is best suited to the scenes set, and shot, in Kibera , the Kenyan slum that Tessa visits with a native doctor. (She peculiarly insists on giving birth in the hospital that serves the slumdwellers, as if to say, "If it's good enough for the locals it's good enough for me," though the moviemakers clearly think it isn't good enough for anybody.) Unfortunately, in the rest of The Constant Gardener Meirelles's style is noticeable in less meaningful ways. For instance, he shoots the preparation of a banquet meal the way another director might shoot a mortar attack and Tessa and Quayle's initial sex scene could function as a parody of certain perfume ads. The sequencing of remarkable shots is intentionally nerve-jangling, but it can also be "lush."
Generally I prefer to discuss a movie in aesthetic terms?narrative structure, acting styles, visuals?i.e., the area of a critic's competence. It feels sort of ridiculous to set my soapbox down next to le Carr?'s and Meirelles's and try to shout them down, but I'd like to explain that while their reliance on narrative formulas reduces le Carr?'s intended political message to pulp, the message itself is flawed.
As one character says in the movie, the drug companies never do anything except for profit, which is indisputable, but what the critics of the industry don't understand is that , by permitting generic copies of their drugs before the expiration of their patents, or by selling their drugs at cost, . As the Tax Court laid out the economics in its opinion in Eli Lilly & Co. v. Comm'r, 84 T.C. 996, 1160-61 (1985), "Pharmaceutical companies rely for their long-range survival on the research and development of new chemical products as well as on the maintenance and upgrading of their existing patents. The time and cost of inventing and developing new drugs and testing them in order to receive FDA approval to market them is a complex, risky, and expensive process. A pharmaceutical company must fund that process through the revenues of its successfully marketed products." And we want a constant flow of new drugs, which tend to be better than older ones. According to Bandow in this 8 May 2003 Policy Analysis (No. 475) , Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg concluded in National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 8147 (March 2001) "that replacing 1,000 prescriptions for older drugs with 1,000 prescriptions for newer drugs would increase drug costs by $18,000 but slash hospital costs by at least $44,000."
In his review in the 17 September 2005 New Republic Online, that eternal numbnuts Stanley Kauffmann connects the dots: he reports that before the release of The Constant Gardener a pharmaceutical industry representative sent movie reviewers an e-mail saying, among other things, that "from 1998 to 2003, the pharmaceutical industry donated $4.1 billion ? to improve global health," to which Kauffmann retorts, "The email says nothing about the prices of drugs that made those billions available." Kauffmann is perhaps one of the "many people" who, in Bandow's words, "appear to believe that pharmaceuticals fall from the sky rather like manna from heaven. In their view, employees of the evil drug companies got up before anyone else and grabbed the manna, and then sold it at outrageous prices."
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The resulting patent rights and copyrights exist not primarily to make money for inventors and artists but to provide them with a financial incentive to come up with their works in the first place, explicitly for the benefit of society generally. In the case of patents, inventors get an exclusive right to the financial rewards of their patented subject for a limited time (20 years in the case of pharmaceuticals) as a trade-off for publishing the technology embodied in their inventions.
Invention is, however, a hit-or-miss prospect. Doug Bandow writes in Policy Analysis, "Of every 5,000 to 10,000 substances reviewed [by pharmaceutical companies' research & development organizations], only about 250 make it to the animal-testing stage. Around 5 of them go on to human clinical trials. Only one, on average, makes it into the market. Even at that point, only 3 of 10 new drugs actually make money." This academic study from the Journal of Health Economics 22 (2003) estimates the cost of developing a new drug as $802 million (in year 2000 dollars; $403 million is out-of-pocket expenditures, the remainder opportunity costs).
Understanding what reimbursement includes requires a basic grasp of business organizations. People tend to speak of "corporations" anthropomorphically, as if they acted for their own interest. The directors and management make the decisions but within limits set by the corporation's by-laws as well as federal and state statutes, regulations, and, perhaps most importantly, fiduciary duties that require them to act in the interest of the shareholders, who are, of course, the owners of the corporation. If the company's revenue and profits decline, past a certain point it will make better sense to liquidate the company than to continue operating it.
The way the directors and management of drug companies make money for the shareholders is by developing and commercially exploiting drug compounds and processes, and the period of patent protection is essential to their success. Profits in the pharmaceutical industry are high (Ronald Bailey puts them at 9% as against 5% typical of many other American industries), but higher-risk investments always earn supernormal returns or the money would flow to less risky ventures. And drug companies do face greater risk: if you open a shoemaking business you can be fairly certain that your factory will produce shoes; if you launch a pharmaceutical R&D organization, however, you have no assurance at all that it will produce a marketable compound, and even if it does the risk of class-action tort suits seeking damages for deleterious side effects never goes away.
If drug companies are forcing "consent" among third-world clinical-trial subjects as is shown in The Constant Gardener that's deplorable and they should stop it. (Expropriation of their patents and profits, of course, is not a punishment fitted to this crime.) But as Meirelles says in this 1 September 2005 interview with FilmForce , "This plot is based on something that happened in Nigeria actually?. [T]hey were testing a drug for diabetes, and after four months, people who were taking the pills couldn't walk, so now there are a couple of lawyers suing this company." So, on the one hand, the drug companies are not getting away with it, not because of le Carr?'s raging potboiler but because of tort liability. On the other hand, we would need more information about what they are allegedly doing. To ensure the accuracy of trial results, some patients must be given placebo, and probably a certain amount of them would have been cured by the real drug. In addition, some trial patients may suffer from debilitating side effects. These aren't good things, but they have to be analyzed in context: Apart from the lack of consent, how is this situation different from clinical trials in America or Europe? What alternative is there for sick people in these impoverished countries? How many people do benefit from the trials? Why are trials outsourced to other countries in the first place?
The Constant Gardener does not assess the situation reasonably or make the slightest attempt to understand it from a balanced point of view. Still Le Carr? has warned, as Kauffmann quotes, "[B]y comparison with the reality, my story [i]s as tame as a holiday postcard," and, as quoted in this 2 March 2001 Kaiser Foundation Daily HIV/AIDS Report , the actions of drug companies are "far more awful than anything [he's] written about." This is classic conman speak. Why on earth would he omit the most damning information he knew of? Would you write about the Nazi treatment of the Jews and leave out the extermination camps?
Le Carr? confined these inane remarks to publicity for the book; incorporates similar sleight-of-tongue into his new movie itself. At the end of Lord of War the protagonist Yuri Orlov (), an international gun trafficker, is busted and then mysteriously let off the hook thanks to his dark, but unspecified, connections with the U.S. military. Unspecified connections?in other words, Niccol can hint at deep entanglements without providing any evidence whatsoever.
Lord of War could certainly use Cage at his zaniest because nothing is convincing at the literal level; apart from Cage's performance it's a very stylized depiction of its subject. (Stylized but not comic: the sole touch of wit comes when the paint on the body of an airplane Yuri is trying to pass off as his private ride smears on takeoff.) For instance, Yuri is supposedly one of the biggest arms merchants in the world, but he doesn't seem to have an organization. (He has fewer people working for him than a single-lot used-car dealer.) Yuri does it all himself?so there he is in the post-Soviet munitions warehouses snapping up AK-47s and tanks and helicopters, and there he is in the plane or on the cargo ship making deliveries and foiling the authorities. In other words, Yuri acts with superhuman effectiveness in an unrealistically vast theater, yet Cage's damp performance and Niccol's evident belief that he's showing us how these things really come about keep the brash comic-book approach from having any punch.
A specialist in combining slick high-tech concepts with fogeyish worrywarting (S1m0ne (2002), The Truman Show (1998), Gattaca (1997)), It's also overkill because, as Jack Valentine's pursuit of him makes plain, Yuri sells arms in contravention of law. (In other words, Niccol didn't need to make the movie to keep us from running out and selling guns to African dictators.) At the same time, Niccol shows too much for the good of this point. When Yuri sells guns to some heinous African militia that intends to massacre refugees, the sale takes place just over the hill from the refugee camp so we will know what's coming?we see militia members whack a small boy and his mother with machetes. Which establishes both that they shouldn't be sold guns but also that guns aren't the source of the problem. If one has no choice but to be massacred, wouldn't guns be preferable?
The Constant Gardener and Lord of War don't begin to give the situations that they fictionalize their due, though The Constant Gardener is infinitely more skillful than Lord of War, which is both a mess and dull. Le Carr? is a bigger cultural player than Niccol, of course, but there appears to be no difference for him between reality and a melodramatically compressed version of reality. Both le Carr? and Niccol slight the issues but nonetheless pride themselves for their political "passion," which in the form it's given in these movies is even more recreational, even more useless, than Tessa Quayle's "speaking up."
For a real-life version of the left-wing heroic romance of fighting the pharmaceutical companies in Africa , see this 1 May 2001 Salon.com article about my fellow Yale Law School graduate, and friend, Amy Kapczynski.
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