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A lefty film reviewer praises a nasty piece of anti-capitalist propaganda
Gerard Jackson
Last week I showed why Tom Ryan’s review of George Clooney’s
Good Luck and Goodnight was a typical piece of leftwing propaganda. I also promised that I would deal with his brief review of The Constant Gardener (Sunday Age Preview, 15 January 2006), another celluloid piece of agitprop based on a book by the rabid anti-American John Le Carré.
Le Carré’s basic theme is that evil drug companies are performing Nazi-style experiments on hapless Africans. This vile nonsense reminds me of what George Orwell once said of lefties: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool”. And of course, Mr Ryan is no ordinary man. As film and television critic for the Sunday Age Preview his infantile leftism eminently qualifies him for current position with the Spencer Street Soviet.
So let us do what Ryan thought was totally unnecessary and take a much closer look at this “deeply romantic film”. The action takes place in Kenya where black lives and politicians come cheap, at least according to the movie, and criminal corporations are free to carry out their nefarious plans.
Alert to what the corporation is up to Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a progressive activist, is murdered before she can expose its crimes. Fortunately for Africa and the rest of the world her martyrdom is not in vain. Troubled by the suspicious circumstances of her death, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), her husband and a British diplomat with the High Commission, becomes determined to unravel the conspiracy and avenge his wife’s death, which of course he does.
The Constant Gardener is one of those rare films whose plot, despite the directing skill of Fernando Meirelles, is both laughable and despicable. Like all lefties Meirelles displays a staggering degree of ignorance of the economics and politics of the real world. Fortunately for us, Meirelles allowed the film to inadvertently reveal his own hypocrisy and moral cowardice.
Near the end of the movie Fiennes finds himself in an African village which is under attack by mounted raiders. What the film leaves unsaid is that these raider are very real and we know them as the murderous Janjaweed — fanatical Arabs who are, even as I write, massacring and enslaving black Sudanese Christians and animists. But the moralizing Meirelles has not got the guts to reveal these facts to his audience. Like all lefties the real enemy is capitalism — everything else is incidental.
In an unbelievable scene Meirelles has Fiennes trying to bribe a UN pilot in to taking an African girl on board his plane. The noble pilot refuses the bribe and leaves the girl behind. Evidently Meirelles believes the UN is a corrupt-free zone. (I guess he has yet to learn of the food-for-oil scandal). But what pilot with an once of humanity in him would have refused to take the girl?
Meirelles has Dr Lorbeer (who thinks, meaning Meirelles, that “big pharmaceuticals are right up there with the arms dealers”) telling Fiennes that if the girl is lucky she’ll find a UN refugee centre. Apparently Meirelles is also ignorant of another UN scandal, the one in which its so-called “peace keepers” sexually exploited children, turned young girls into prostitutes, and stole foods and other items intended for refugees.
The film is a vicious caricature of capitalism whose theme bears a strong resemblance to the crude anti-capitalist propaganda of the now defunct and unlamented Soviet Union. It drips political bile and radiates a pathological contempt for reality.
Writers and directors who think developing lifesaving drugs is the equivalent of selling machine guns to sadistic Arabs are not morally qualified to lecture the rest of us on the nature of right and wrong. Drug companies have saved countless lives. How many lives have Le Carré Meirelles saved?
It’s obviously the film’s ideological leitmotif — and the evidence be damned — that ideological buffoons like Tom Ryan find so attractive.
Leftwing film reviewer drools over Clooney’s anti-McCarthy agitprop
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 30 January 2006