BEFORE: I could have followed the Keira Knightley link, which would take me to another film about Nazis, "The Aftermath", but then I wouldn't have a clear path to Mother's Day, which I have if I follow the other path, with Ralph Fiennes carrying over from "The Duchess". Again, I'm going to skip the 1992 version of "Wuthering Heights" that he was in, that's been tabled and earmarked for February - even with being out of work, there are still only so many days in May. There are also only so many days in February 2021, but a future month seems a lot more open-ended, I've been extended the February romance topic into mid-March lately, so there you go. Here's hoping the bricks link up next February without having to add too much mortar.
THE PLOT: A widower is determined to get to the bottom of a potentially explosive secret involving his wife's murder, big business and corporate corruption.
AFTER: I think I made the right call here, over which films to watch now and which to save for February - this one didn't feel very romance-oriented at all, even though this diplomat clearly loved his wife, and it seemed (at times) that she loved him back, but a loose theme for this week has turned out to be people who just can't quite seem to get on the same page where their relationships are concerned. In "45 Years" a woman started to suspect that her longtime husband still had a thing for his old dead girlfriend, and that called their whole relationship into question. In "The Duchess" a woman marries the Duke of Devonshire and finds out that the marriage isn't what she expected it to be, and they both take on lovers and form a unique living arrangement. Here Justin Quayle's wife has to juggle her activism and her relationship, and then after she gets killed her relationship becomes very difficult to maintain.
So there's a lot going on here, from politics to corporate espionage to testing drugs on African villages to the whole social structure of sub-Saharan Africa. Was anyone disappointed that this film really wasn't about gardening? I mean, come on, at least one hardcore gardening fan must have turned up at the theater, thinking, "Finally, a film about a man who's obsessed with growing plants, just like I am, I can't wait to see this!" and then got lost in a miasma of pharmaceutical companies and British High Council regulations. What the hell is a High Council anyway, is that part of Parliament, or something else entirely?
Then there's all the oh-so-trendy time-jumping - we learn very early on that Tessa Quayle has died (umm, no SPOILER ALERT needed, I think), so then it turns into one of those very flashbacky things where we all try to figure out how and why that happened by assembling the crumbs the story shows us back into a loaf of bread. Sometimes when we see her after that, it's in flashback and other times it's because her husband is having a moment where he's remembering something and talking to her as if she's still there. So that just added to the confusion - maybe after watching this three times it forms into something like a coherent whole, but I just don't have that kind of time.
The framework for the plot is a global pandemic - accidentally relevant again! - only it's not Covid, it's tuberculosis. But maybe we can get a glimpse here of what's to come IRL by looking at what's come before in fiction. They're talking now about human trials for a Covid vaccine, and who do you think Big Pharma is going to use as test subjects? Rich white people? Ha ha, that's ridiculous. They're probably going to find a bunch of brown people in some other country, in this film they're testing the new TB drug on villagers in Kenya, and they may not even be willing volunteers. The villagers only get food and medical treatment if they take this experimental drug. Then if there happen to be any side effects, those get swept under the rug, because the pharmaceutical company has too much invested in the drug for it to fail, plus any changes to the drug would alter the timeline for it coming to market. A few billion in drug sales is probably worth a small percentage of random villagers dying, right? Unfortunately, this might be what we're looking at where a Covid-19 vaccine is concerned - with many different companies in various countries racing to make and test vaccines, who's regulating all of the trials? The first company with successful trials is going to make a mint, so who's to say they aren't going to fudge some of the results? Already we've seen stock prices of some companies rise on speculation alone that hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir, because we all WANT something to work, and the news organizations are also competing to break the news of a cure or a helpful drug, so they probably started speculating on TV about this too soon in every case.
When Justin starts following in his wife's footsteps, and tracking down the people she spoke to over the course of her investigation, he starts to get death threats against him - well, the upside is that he then knows that he's on the right track. But who's really behind everything, who's pulling the strings? To some extent the "Law & Order" rules are in effect here - like if you're watching the opening credits of "Law & Order" or its spinoff "SVU" and you see the name of a known actor doing a guest spot, yeah, it's probably him that did it. Right?
But back to that point about two people not being on the same page in their relationship - Justin overhears Tessa talking to someone about a "marriage of convenience" and one that produces "dead offspring". It's unfortunate that he draws the wrong conclusion and begins to doubt her motivations for marrying him, when both of those terms also relate to the businesses she was investigating. He then has to go on this very personal journey just to find out what she was really talking about, and to learn that she did love him very much and wasn't just using him to investigate corporate wrongdoing. But did that knowledge have to come at such a high cost? There's another lesson hidden under the obvious ones, and that lesson is that at some point, worrying about one's relationship and reacting to those worries can end up causing the most damage. It's possible to destroy the whole situation just by being paranoid and irrationally jealous, and then find out all your fears were unwarranted.
No "Star Wars" actors today, that streak is over - but there is (sort of) an accidental Mother's Day tie-in, it would be great if that could continue for the next few days. Also, I learned that British people apparently pronounce the name "Guido" as "GEE-do", instead of "GWEE-do", but I'm not quite sure why. It's a mystery, I guess.
Also starring Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Hubert Koundé, Archie Panjabi (last seen in "San Andreas"), Bill Nighy (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Gerard McSorley (last seen in "War Horse"), Pete Postlethwaite (last seen in "Amistad"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Richard McCabe (also carrying over from "The Duchess"), Juliet Aubrey, Nick Reding, Anneke Kim Sarnau, John Keogh (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Jeffrey Caine, Rupert Simonian (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Ben Parker, Chris Payne, Sidede Onyulo, Daniele Harford, John Sibi-Okumu.
RATING: 5 out of 10 fake passports
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