An adaptation of a John le Carré suspense novel, and a long stride for filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Le Carré, to be sure, has always had an elevated social consciousness, and a missionary zeal to match, and so the stretch for the Brazilian is largely geographical: to Kenya, where a multinational pharmaceutical company is using the natives as unwitting guinea pigs, or sacrificial lambs, for an experimental drug called Dypraxa. The spectator will require only the slightest touch of paranoia, or slightest taste for the paranoia genre, to find this premise credible. He will face a stiffer challenge to find it cinematic. Vague on particulars, slow in progress, thick in texture, the film follows a course of knowingness rather than "showingness." And the jiggle and jump in the visual style, though tempered a bit from City of God, can drum up little excitement on their own. Of course, many a filmmaker before Meirelles, like many a casual reader, has failed to locate the thrills in a le Carré thriller. Yet this one holds plenty of appeal as a love story, one which we know from the outset is to be an unhappy one. The murder of a British diplomat's wife in the African backcountry opens the door on a flashback to their first beginnings: he (Ralph Fiennes, almost cringingly diffident) dutifully reading a dull lecture on behalf of a government official in absentia, and she (Rachel Weisz, free and easy) reading him the riot act afterwards on the U.K.'s role in Iraq: "Vietnam the sequel." Not a meet-cute, but a meet-rude. And before they have time really to get to know one another, they're in bed, they're married, and, with a baby on the way, they're in Kenya, where the differences in their personalities are brought out in sharpest contrast: the professional fence-straddler and the inveterate firebrand. His private inquiry into her murder, apart from the light shed on corporate malfeasance, answers all questions about the genuineness of her love for him, and of his for her. As we've seen in such other le Carré vehicles as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking-Glass War, The Russia House, and (the most cinematic of these) The Little Drummer Girl, a gooey sentimentalist lurks within the sourball. Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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