Alan Rapp

I’m sure there are people that are going to love this film; I’m not one of them.  Even the strong pefromances from the two leads can’t quite save The Constant Gardener from being both boring and predictable – two words you don’t want to describe a dramatic thriller.

The Constant Gardener
2 Stars

Some novels can be adapted to screen successfully and some cannot.  The Constant Gardener belongs in the second category.  The structure for the movie might work in a novel but here the story just gets bogged down.  The film is oddly spliced together with flashbacks in an attempt to try and make the obvious seem murky and mysterious.  Too bad the end result just makes it look lame.  It’s sad such great leading performances were wasted on such a bad script.

The film begins with the discovery of the body of Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) who has been brutally murdered in the Kenyan countryside.  From there the film moves through flashbacks of Tessa’s life mixed with her husband Justin’s (Ralph Fiennes) attempt to discover why she was killed and what became of her companion Arnold (Hubert Kounde) who has disappeared.  Unwilling to accept the official explanation of Tessa’s death being a result of an affair between Tessa and Arnold who must have killed her in a passionate rage, Justin decides to conduct his own investigation and learns that Tessa’s death wasn’t caused by anything so simple.

Let’s start out with the perfromances which are outstanding.  Fiennes is well chosen for the bitter and remorseful character who will stop at nothing to discover the truth.  Weisz who we only see in flashbacks though is the real heart of the film.  Her character is the only one from the film that is complex and three dimensional and whose feelings and actions have consequences not just to herself but to her husband and the world around her.

Aside from the acting the films problems are numerous.  First off the flashbacks reveal too much of Tessa’s character for the audience not to realize what she really died for and the cause itself can be easily deduced very early in the film.  Second the scenes involving the meeting of the two seem to suggest a relationship of convience which would hardly justify Justin’s odyssey later in the film.  Third the scenes of Tessa’s possible infedelities don’t work because the relationship with Justin isn’t developed far enough and the film is too cavalier in giving away more information than is necessary.  And finally the choice in editing makes the film too helter skielter.  It was obviously chosen to try and hide the extremely simple answer to the “mystery” of Tessa’s death, but not only does it not succeed in covering the truth it only detaches the viewer from the film.

The movie was adapted from the novel by John le Carre and I don’t doubt that the story might make a very good novel where such information and clues can be spaced out over chapters.  In a compacted theatrical version the mystery just doesn’t work.  If Justin knew anything about his wife he would be easily able to deduce what happened to her, but the film tries to make Justin totally oblivious to who his wife was and what she was up to.  The result becomes a series of flashbacks between the two where we learn everything about Tessa while Justin stands there totally oblivous.  If he’s really that dense, how’s he suppossed to solve her murder?

The film just doesn’t work as a thriller because the structure continually takes the viewer out of the story.  The film doesn’t work as a mystery because the reasons for the death can easily be deduced just by learning a fraction of who Tessa was.  The drama doesn’t work because neither the love story nor Tessa’s murder seem enough to push the action of the film that develops into a weak Bourne Identity as Justin becomes an expert on covert tatics, surveillance, and digging for the truth (none of which are needed for this very simple plot).  The film tries every trick it can using red herrings, odd editing, and plot contivances to hide what is essentially rather obvious.

Do you have an obsession with how pigeons were used during World War II?  Yeah, me neither.  Valiant is a fine little film for senior citizens who like animated features with talking birds; unless that’s you you’d probably do better with a Disney straight to video release.

Valiant
2 Stars

As the credits rolled I wondered, not for the first time, who exactly this film was made for.  It seems odd to think that Disney designed an animated feature specifically with senior citizens in mind, seeing how catering to such a small niche market doesn’t exactly mesh with the conglomerate that bought ABC and opened Euro-Disney.  This would be a good film for grandparents who lived during WWII to take their grandchildren to and talk about afterwards; sadly the rest of us will end up feeling more than a little bored.

A War Movie For Kids?  Disney Style???

The year is 1944 and pigeons are being used to relay vital messages from the Allied Command to the forces deployed in the field.  The Axis Powers have deployed hawks to capture the pigeons led by Von Talon (Tim Curry).  Valiant (Ewan McGregor) is a young undersized pigeon who feels the need to serve his country and enlists.  His platoon contains the “John Canyesque” Bugsy (Rick Gervais), the nerdy Lofty (Pip Torrens), and the musclebrain twins Tailfeather (Dan Roberts) and Toughwood (Brian Lonsdale).  Our heroes are trained and sent of with the heroic Gutsy (Hugh Laurie) on their first mission to deliver messages vital to the war effort.

The scenes of the training are much what you’d expect from a Disney version of movies like Stripes.  Not much new or of any interest; pigeon and hawk alike are stockpile characters stolen from other flicks.  The hawks themselves are fine, but they aren’t given the menace of previous Disney villains.  Instead they are used more for comic relief, especially Talon’s two helpers (Michael Schlingmann and Rik Mayall), which makes taking them seriously as a threat is almost impossible.  Even when Valiant and his comrades are put into what should be dangerous situations we never really feel they are in any serious danger.  It’s bad when you end up rooting for the Nazis, but we simply don’t care whether these characters live or die and I will admit after an hour of this tedious story I was gleefully hoping for a hawk to make himself a pigeon sandwich.

The movie starts out promising with a British pigeon black and white propaganda film and the capture of Mercury (John Cleese).  Cleese has some of the films best lines as a P.O.W. captured and interrogated by the hawks.  Too bad his part is so small; his wit could have been used in other scenes.  The story keeps you vaguely interested as it seems to promise better things to come.  We are shown several moments where we expect the film to takeoff and fly, but this bird never really gets off the ground.

It seems odd that this was released in theaters; it has the feel of recent Disney straight to video releases.  The movie just never reaches the level you would expect from a Disney film.  While I applaud the studio for making a different type of animated feature, the result is less than what one would have hoped for.  Most younger children aren’t going to get the gist of the film without detailed explanation, adolescents will avoid it like the plague, and most adults under sixty will be bored out of their minds.  Sadly, it was made about four decades too late to have any cultural interest other than in Britain, where I expect it will find some modest success.  Although not terrible, I can’t think such a mediocre movie was what such a great cast was assembled to produce.  Too bad a group of actors like this was wasted on this turkey.