I was going to ignore the Oscars this year.  They have rarely interested me in the past.  I don't often agree with their choices.  This year I didn't even agree with their nominations, for the most part.  But Paul Haggis's Crash did win the award for Best Motion Picture, and that was a good choice.  So I read the rest of the news about what happened at the Oscars.  And I was pleasantly surprised to find four nominations for The Constant Gardener. 

One of the nominations paid off in gold.  Rachel Weisz won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Constant Gardener.  In the beginning of the movie she is murdered, and the rest of the movie revolves around her husband's crusade to find out why, liberally mixed with long flashbacks in which Rachel plays a major role.  There were no other leading ladies in the movie at all.  I don't know why her role was considered that of a supporting actress.  I guess you can't call her a leading actress if she's dead for the whole movie.  But maybe it's for the best.  I don't know if she would have walked off with the leading actress Oscar, and she certainly deserved one for her role in this film. 

But her award has importance beyond what it will do for her.  It helps to promote a movie more people should see, because it addresses a pressing social issue.  I'm not a proponent of "social issue" films particularly, and Hollywood embarrassed itself this year by nominating mildly popular message movies rather than films the public actually goes to see.  In fact, the sum of the ticket sales for all of the movies nominated for Best Picture (about 250 million) was only a fraction of the sales for Narnia alone (about 700 million) or the latest Harry Potter episode alone (about 900 million).  I can't help thinking that 50 or 100 years from now, Narnia and Potter will be revered as all time greats, the way we now revere Gone With The Wind and Wizard of Oz, both of which were made about 70 years ago, while the Oscar-nominated movies of 2006 will be little more than a historical footnote.  But in the case of this movie The Constant Gardener, the importance of the message justifies a different view. 

Gardener is from a book by the enigmatic British spy-story master John LeCarre.  I rarely miss stories inspired by LeCarre books.  I recently saw the British mini-series called Smiley's People starring Alec Guinness.  It was excellent. 

LeCarre's spy world is very real and very dark.  And it is little varnished with any pretense of true good guys versus bad guys and his stories are rarely graced with a climactic win on the part of the protagonist.  In his world, the protagonists amble along, trying to do what they think is right, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, and in the end it is often more or less a wash.  One doesn't get into LeCarre for an emotional lift.  But the intricacy of his stories and the realism are addictive. 

Gardener is no exception.  It is true to type.  It is a dark story and it gets darker, then darker yet.  It reminds me of the quote from Lily Tomlin, "It's going to get a lot worse before it gets worse."  But Gardener exposes a social issue that is being widely ignored in our time – the unethical and amoral activities of the major drug companies, who have become so rich and powerful they can buy public and government support for even the most dastardly schemes.  Their broad purpose seems to be to make more money than God, and they seem to be willing to ignore human life and human decency to get it.  One is reminded of the words of Orson Welles playing the evil Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949).  His former friend accuses him of murdering people by pushing bogus prescription drugs in post-war Europe.  The scene takes place as the two of them are sitting in a Ferris wheel that is stopped at the top.  "Have you seen any of your victims?" asks his friend.  "You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things," intones Orson Welles as he points at the children and families running around on the ground far below, "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?" 

Welles seemed to presage the viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry of our time.  But I digress. 

Rachel Weisz's loyal husband, a British diplomat in an African country, decides to figure out why his wife was murdered.  What he walks into is a world of death and danger where the authorities have been bribed to allow the testing of drugs on people en masse, without their express knowledge or understanding.  These bad drugs kill or disable people in large numbers.  Big Pharmaceutical then weighs the results and decides whether the collateral damage is manageable.  There is no thought for the families left without a mother or a father who are victims of these gruesome experiments.  Rachel's husband soon finds that the people who are running this fraud are more than willing to kill anyone antagonistic to their purpose who "knows too much".  He winds up on the run in much the same way he realizes his wife must have been. 

The story is very real.  Anyone who thinks we live in an enlightened age where such things don't happen need only read this recent news story about a similar experiment.  In addition, there is plenty of material on the net regarding similar programs in India and Russiawhere a few American dollars will buy a lot of blind-eye cooperation. 

So I recommend the film.  It's emotionally rough, but if you can get past that, it's well made.  And then you can say you went to one of those obscure message movies that get nominated for Academy Awards instead of the big ones making hundreds of millions of dollars wowing people with crude tricks like entertainment, inspiration and happy endings.  That should get you in with the in crowd.