All the World's a Garden

From beginnings to endings now, as the semester closes down.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

This image is from the ending of The Constant Gardener (2005), directed by Fernando Meirelles. Though it's hard to talk about endings without spoilers, it doesn't give away too much to say that the protagonist of the film, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), is the constant gardener of the title, taken from the book by John Le Carre. At the beginning of the story Quayle is a diplomat in Kenya who seems to insulate himself from a complicated world by creating and tending beautiful gardens. He has taken Voltaire's advice to "cultivate your garden" quite literally, but it doesn't protect him. His world is interrupted by tragedy when his activist wife is killed in mysterious circumstances. The rest of the story is Quayle's "search for the truth" in dramatic terms, but it soon becomes more existential than that.  In order to figure out what happened to his wife, Quayle first needs to understand the world better, the world that his wife immersed herself in. The film is really a tale of his re-education, or awakening, into a fuller consciousness. Of course, this means he becomes conscious too of what he has lost — his wife, but also some innocence and contentment. The implications of this shift are not all clear from the film, in which Quayle remains a discreet and private figure. But the change itself is complete–Quayle grows in his capacities to love, to sympathize, and to suffer. The world is now his garden. It is this transformation that is on view in this image, from the last scene of the film. Now alone with the truth, he can wait for his fate with a moral courage he earned along the way. Far from home and far from his garden, in this barren and beautiful landscape, he whispers his wife's name.