![the constant gardener movie rating the constant gardener movie rating](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/30/tcg_2.jpg)
This is where Fiennes's performance feels so elegantly calibrated, the slow transformation of a quiet, pen-pushing desk jockey into man of action, from a slouch into a sleuth.
![the constant gardener movie rating the constant gardener movie rating](https://cdn.hmv.com/r/w-640/hmv/files/64/64f5c0dd-0e30-40cf-b534-67ab213301aa.jpg)
Having survived so long on impeccable good manners he must now emulate her "terrier" tenacity, hoodwinking passport controls to fly to Berlin and seek out a vital contact of his late wife. Disconsolate, but not duped: Justin knows that Tessa was pursuing an investigation into a dodgy pharmaceuticals company which had been testing a tuberculosis drug on certain African "guinea pigs", and finds himself driven to finish the work she started. The British High Commission decides that she was murdered in a crime of passion by her travelling companion, Arnold, and back in London Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy) discreetly serves up this bitter pill, along with a lunch of Dover sole, to the disconsolate widower. The possibility that Tessa may have been unfaithful is central to the plot's ambiguity. The back-to-front shuffle of events means that soon we are watching Justin turn up at the morgue with his friend Sandy (Danny Huston) to identify Tessa's violated corpse, and the moment Sandy retches at the sight will come back to haunt us: it transpires that he loved Tessa too, but what went on between them will only be discovered as the story unpeels its intricate layers. "I feel safe with you," she tells him, a tormenting irony in the light of what betides her.
![the constant gardener movie rating the constant gardener movie rating](https://www.magpictures.com/360/images/photos/photo_01.jpg)
Jeffrey Caine's screenplay sets up the romance between Justin and Tessa in neat, economical strokes, and moves it along so swiftly that when she asks him to take her on his latest posting to Kenya, he hardly has time to wonder if this was her plan all along.