The Constant Gardener

(Movie Review)

I was slightly disappointed in this film. It had been recommended to me by a couple different people, and I had been led to believe it was a true story about real African history.

It’s not exactly a true story, but the plot does revolve around drug companies using untested drugs on African countries. Which is a real issue. So I guess it’s close enough.

The big problem for me is that the film uses that issue to create a sort of suspense thriller. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I have to admit that this film (and the internet researching I did following it) did increase my awareness of the unsavory practices of pharmaceutical companies in the 3rd world, but I did feel that the movie was simply using it as a background to make their suspense story and sappy love story more compelling. And on top of that, it wasn’t all that great of a suspense movie.

“The Nation” actually has a great review of this film, and the issues it deals with, which I would highly recommend you read in its entirety. In fact, stop reading my blog, click on this link, and go over and read The Nation’s review.

Here are a couple excerpts for anyone too lazy to click on the link.

But challenging these practices is not nearly as black-and-white as this film would have it. Tessa Quayle, the martyred activist, stands up to yell "bullshit" at public lectures, shaking her lovely dark mane while she's at it. At cocktail parties, she loudly embarrasses the health minister, who marches off in a huff. Good stuff, but the reality is that uncompromising activists--even if they look like Rachel Weisz--rarely enjoy this kind of privileged access to power so effortlessly. Tessa has it too good and too bad, too. She ends up paying with her life for her exposure of the botched trial; in real life, bad drugs and unethical research practices often continue unhindered despite mountains of data and reports detailing their defects.
As I found while researching a book on the topic, experimental protocols that would be condemned as unethical in the West--including placebo trials among ailing AIDS patients--are frequently described in the medical press; when the subjects are poor Africans or Asians, nary an eye is batted. (Recall that papers describing this country's most egregious scientific study, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which government doctors denied treatment to black syphilitics, regularly appeared in the medical press from the 1930s onward. That study wasn't terminated until 1972.)
In the film, the trial's results are so dangerous that they must be suppressed by an international conspiracy of corporate execs and state authorities. If only. The trouble is that most of the time new drugs aren't uniformly deadly, rendering unequivocal data showcasing their killer properties. Rather, new drugs do work, just not very well, or not for everyone, or not without side effects or, most frequently, not any better than older, safer drugs. What that means is that challenging unethical trials requires more than wrenching a few critical reports from official dustbins.

Link of the Day
100 companies -- and federal agencies -- are connected to 40 percent of the worst toxic waste dumps

The Constant Gardener: Move Review (Scripted)