The Constant Gardener, is a movie based on the book written by John LeCarre. John LeCarre was cast adript by the end of cold war, much like the Easter Bloc. Fortunately, the Eastern Bloc transformed itself to a better place, John LeCarre did not.

The problem with the book is that half is a flashback, followed by a story in the present. The flashback starts when the wife, Tessa Quayle, of the protagonist, John Quayle, is found raped, and murdered on a road in Kenya. Initially we suspect the mysterious Kenyan doctor that she hanged out with, but he is too virtuous to convince anyone but the characters trapped in LeCarre’s book. The second half is the explanation of why Tessa had to die. And being an annoying activist trying to save the world is not a good enough explanation. It takes about 15 minutes to understand that there is an evil conspiracy involving drugs, the government and money. The horror! The horror!
The agonizing exposition of the wife’s work reminds me of Ralphe Fienne’s other work (The English Patient) with it’s soft light, unbearable slow pace, pointless sex scene involving and demure and quiet vocals (my speakers were maxed out and I could still not hear them or was I nodding off?). Once the exposition is complete we turn to the present moment. It’s 1944… oops wrong movie.

In fact it’s the 1990’s and the big pharmas are trying to make a quick buck by doing TB tests in Africa where simple things like clinical trials don’t have the same controls as they do in the US or Western Europe. Thanks to those clinical tests, the drugs will be adopted in Europe in time to save us from the coming TB plague! Why? Because the tests will doctored up just enough.
So wait. This movie ignores basic science and process around how drugs go to market and reflects society’s ongoing ambivalence of how drugs are manufactured. The basic science infuriates me, the ambivalence irritates. For how drugs actually get tested and the kinds of process that are involved check out the FDA’s website.

But for the ambivalence, let me stress, that as part of the development of drugs, people die, little fuzzy animals die, and some people make a lot of money. It’s a faustian pact that allows our lives last a little longer on the backs of thousands of dead lives both in the animal and human kingdom. Some of the folks who die or suffer do so under informed consent, and others do it for a fast buck and others because of their location in the food chain. But the reality is that without clinical trials, we would never have invented the millions of drugs we do have.

And if you want to understand the imapct on our lives, watch Lost. Everytime you got cut before antibiotics were invented you died. Think about that. Every single time. In the first world war, the survival rate for abdomen wounds was 1%.

So big pharma should make money. And we should encorage them to make even more money. And we should think that for the most part there are watchmen watching the watchmen.

But all of that subtlety is lost in this film. Instead it’s bad evil corporations trying to make even more money in the drug lotteries of this messed up world. Oh and the sad tale of love found and lost and death and the circle of life.
Pass on this one.