"Put $50,000 in the right hands and you can test battery acid as skin lotion" what a profound and telling statement.... especially with what's happening in the world today.

"The Constant Gardener" seeks to juggle three film styles-the romance, the thriller, and provocative social realism. On all three levels, the film succeeds, especially with the latter.

Much credit should go to director Fernando Meirelles, who has synthesized a virtual textbook of different film techniques. The uses of set-ups, location filming, lenses, film editing, and close-ups were simply dazzling. While the panoramic scenes of the African landscape were breathtaking, there was a starkly contrasting approach to the close-ups in the scenes in the city. The jittery, hand-held camera sequences added to the dramatic tension and underscored the urgency of coming to terms with poverty and disease.

The romantic portion of the film was anchored by the two characters played by Ralph Fiennes (Justin) and Rachel Weisz (Tessa). Their first meeting was dynamically presented as Tessa was a social activist heckling Justin as he was making a political speech. When the hall was cleared, however, it was Justin who was actually comforting Tessa after her outburst. The juxtaposition of the placid, passive Justin versus the fervent, hyper-kinetic Tessa was brilliantly established in that opening scene.

The strands of thriller and social realism are inextricably tied together in the film. As a whodunit, "The Constant Gardener" seeks to uncover what actually happened to Justin and Tessa on their African journey. At the same time, the main culprit that emerges is the heavy hand of greed as the pharmaceutical companies exploit helpless victims of tuberculosis for the purpose of testing and marketing an experimental drug. At one point in the film, it is disclosed to Justin that the pharmaceutical industry is no different than "arms dealers."

Another British film entitled "The Girl in the Café" appeared recently on American cable television. That gem of a film is a low-budget version of "The Constant Gardener." Both films seek to raise consciousness about the tragedy of world hunger and disease. The title of "The Constant Gardener" is an important one because of the time and care taken by Justin in his garden both at work and at home. In the process, however, he has ignored the urgent pleas of his wife, and he has lost touch with the world crisis to which he is arguably a contributor.

The eighteenth-century French writer Voltaire ended his famous novel "Candide" with the slogan "One must cultivate one's garden." This film would appear to suggest that instead of tending our gardens, we need to follow the lead of Justin and Rachel and see how we all might work to help others right now.

The Constant Gardener has ingredients that we have seen before but director Fernando Meirelles gives it a mix that gives this thriller a refreshing sheen. It is an adaptation of a John Le Carre novel.

Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) is a mild mannered British diplomat in Kenya. His wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz) is a social activist/lawyer involved in poverty and ethical issues. She gets involved as an activist in Kenya much to her husband's misgivings and turns up dead.

The evidence points to a doctor that Tessa might have been involved with but Justin decides to dig deep and asks difficult questions to the wealthy and powerful in the region and discovers that his wife was compiling data against a multinational drug company using Africans as guinea pigs for drugs with serious side effects.

With flashbacks we get a sense of man discovering who his wife really was, a woman he married more on impulse and were polar opposites. Its a subtle performance from Fiennes. Weisz on the other hand gets to give an earnest and a more showy performance which won her a best supporting actress Oscar.

Its an ambitious and even cynical film. You kind of get a sense who the bad guys will be and they cared very little about Justin's plight, the man who was obsessed with his garden until he decided to lift his head out of the soil and see his corporate world-view shift.