The Constant Gardener Film Essay

Fernando Meirelles’ “The Constant Gardener” is a complex thriller/love story, based on the novel of John le Carre, containing a heavy use of non-linear story weaving, flashbacks and flash forwards. The main character, Justin Quale, is shown as an unassuming, almost passive person, while his wife, Tessa, is shown as assertive, and almost aggressive. Justin and Tessa are important to the film, because the contrast between their characters helps develop the theme of the never-ending work of gardening.
Gardening itself is a past-time not for people who quickly become bored with the tasks. Weeding, trimming, and planting are such tasks which require a lot of effort, time, and constancy. Therefore, Justin Quayle’s gardening is likened to his wife’s never-ending effort to stop the injustices of the pharmaceutical company “Three Bees”. As the movie progresses, and after Justin’s faith and love for his dead wife are rediscovered, he feels that he has completed the mission that she herself was not able to finish, and as he has finished “uprooting the last of the weeds”, he can now rest, and join his wife in death.
During one of the scenes in the film, Justin says that he can not return back home, because “Tessa was my home”, and yet while he no longer has the will to live, he takes up her unfinished quest and pursues her leads in a way unlike Tessa ever did. Tessa was passionate and confrontational in her exposure of the Three Bee’s plot, but Justin, being the gardener that he was, used different methods to his wife. Knowing from gardening that patience and careful actions are the key, he slowly and politely works through Tessa’s leads, finding out more and more clues about the pharmaceutical company. So even though Tessa is gone, Justin may have found a new home, in this constant struggle for truth.
After coming across Ham, one of Tessa’s cousins, Justin finds out that the company KDH are actually the creators of the Dypraxa drug which is supposed to treat tuberculosis,