But The Constant Gardener arrived just a few days after Katrina, and I saw it on the same day I heard the president say, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breaching of the levees,” even though by simply reading the newspapers and watching television I knew that a variety of groups, including many government agencies, had been concerned about that very specific potential disaster for years. It was the same day that the director of FEMA claimed that the government had no idea that thousands of people were housed in the convention center, though all you had to do was turn on CNN or NBC to see just how awful conditions were becoming at the convention center.

In fact, the shantytown slums of Kenya, as portrayed by director Fernando Mereilles, who made a particularly notorious slum of Rio de Janeiro look so beautiful in the remarkable City of God, look much more lovely than the streets of New Orleans. Mereilles is fascinated in both films with the juxtaposition of privilege and poverty. In The Constant Gardener the very harsh criticism of the government of Kenya is minimized, as is the love story between two white people in Africa, in favor of dissecting the ways that even the noble instincts of the privileged to relieve suffering are corrupted.

Ralph Fiennes, who has perfected the kind of character torn between politics, duty and love in movies like Sunshine, The English Patient and especially as Graham Greene’s Maurice Bendix in The End of the Affair, is the perfect actor to play Justin Quayle. Fiennes gives a absolutely convincing performance. Quayle is a British career diplomat, and when we meet him he is learning of the death of his wife, Tessa.

The Constant Gardener jumps back and forth in time with ease and elegance, and as soon as we learn of Tessa’s death we slip back in time to see Tessa, in full meltdown, challenging Justin as he defends the British government’s participation in the war in Iraq.

Tessa is played by Rachel Weisz, who is so beautiful, who wouldn’t rather argue with her than get along with most women? Their courtship is brief and passionate, and since Justin is about to be shipped to Kenya, Tessa asks to go along, and soon both are in Kenya.

Tessa is a troublemaker. She asks too many questions. She embarrasses important people. She wanders the countryside with Arnold Bluhm, a Western-educated African doctor. When her baby is stillborn, she becomes obsessed with a woman who is dying in the next bed. The woman is taking Dypraxa, a drug that is being tested on the poor. As Tessa investigates the drug testing, she becomes increasingly secretive and slightly unhinged. When she turns up dead, Justin gains a determination to find out what happens that gets more fierce and relentless the more resistance he meets.

He meets a lot of resistance, and it takes all forms. Some claim ignorance. Some blame the victim (“she was just having an affair, and things went wrong”). Some are trying to protect their careers. Some claim the “greater good” should discount any crimes committed. Lies, laziness, stupidity, greed and all varieties of corruption are the excuses Justin meets. Everyone encourages Justin to just move forward and not focus on the past. No one admits to knowing anything, or accepts responsibility for anything, until Justin gets ugly about it.

Justin learns the truth, and it is a sad combination of active and passive behavior that shows no respect for his wife or the people she championed. Through his searching, Justin falls even more deeply in love with Tessa. He learns that she was more wonderful and more in love with him than he imagined. He learns that he has been part of a system that does much less good and much more harm than he imagined.

Justin’s search leads him through the characters of their lives, and a wonderful supporting cast help make his journey fascinating. Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Richard McCabe and Hubert Kounde are especially convincing. Danny Huston is the only weak link in a key role.

I disliked the ending, which I won’t reveal. But, as these kinds of political, investigaitve thrillers shed the Cold War models that used to define them, I wish they would also come up with a more modern dynamic between couples. In old school movies like this, husbands didn’t tell their wives what was going on to “protect” them. In The Constant Gardener, that clichÈ is reversed, but it leads to a similarly unsatisfactory fate for the uninformed spouse.

I long for a truly modern tale where the lovers are honest and trust each other. A woman or a man should be able to say “Darling, this is what I’m doing. It is dangerous, but I have to do it. I ask you to support me and act like you don’t know what is going on to protect yourself.” There would still be plenty of opportunity for mistakes and accidents to complicate the plots, and it would be refreshing.

The Constant Gardener is ambitious and compelling, a real movie that hopefully suggests that the dull product Hollywood has been handing us all year is about to improve as we move towards Oscar season.