Sydney Lumet's light cast a long shadow

I have wanted to see Sidney Lumet’s film Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead ever since it came out in 2007.    I have caught up with it a last, and I am glad I did.

The title comes  from the Irish toast: "May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for your head; may you be 40 years in heaven, before the devil knows you're dead" and it was in fact Lumet’s last film before he died in 2011.    It hardly the kind of film you would expect from an 83 year old.  It is fast and furious, with sex and violence aplenty. 

Lumet once said ‘melodrama is a much maligned genre.  And I hope we can bring it back into fashion. I always think of melodrama as the thing we are all capable of that's swept under the rug.’     This movie is certainly a melodrama.    The action, which typically for a Lumet film takes place over only a few days and is set in New York, pitches us headlong down a helter-skelter slide to hell, starting with a simple plan to rob a suburban jewelry store and ending up with a high body count and a family violently torn apart.     Even the chronology is disruptive, tossing us back and forth in time.    We also get different camera angles when we return to a scene we have previously left.  Lumet had done  a lot of work in TV, and was used to using a number of cameras to shoot a scene.      

Many of Lumet’s films present or explore moral dilemmas.     Here we see the dreadful consequences of what seems to be one bad decision, but it is one that grows out of too many previous moral failures.    It might invite us to consider what our own capacity for evil might be when push comes to a mighty shove.   And what we might have done to bring about that shove. 

Lumet was always an actor’s Director, maybe because he had worked as an actor himself, and over his long career he drew many Oscar nominated - and in four cases Oscar winning - performances from (among others)  Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Faye Dunaway, Chris Sarandon, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix.

That list tells its own story.    His directorial career started with 12 Angry Men (1957)  and included The Pawnbroker (1964), The Hill (1965) Serpico (1973),  Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), Equus (1977)  Running On Empty (1988)  and Q & A (1990).   In fact he has 73 Directorial credits,  43 of them for theatrical movies.

In Before The  Devil  he was reunited with Albert Finney  (their previous collaboration was thirty years previously in Murder on the Orient Express,  a rather untypical Lumet effort),  Ethan Hawke,   Marisa Tomei , and Philip Seymour Hoffman.   He has not worked with any of these three before, nor with his cinematographer, Ron Fortunato, but they worked well together – maybe because Lumet always made time for rehearsal before shooting began, and was willing to go to extremes to allow his players to relax on the set.

The movie draws remarkable performances from his lead actors.    Hoffman dominates, because his character does,  a charismatic and seemingly successful professional who has run himself into deep financial trouble and has a ‘simple plan’ to get himself, and his brother -  who is a failure in so many dimensions - out of it.    Ethan Hawke also gives a remarkable performance, falling apart on screen.   Marisa Tomei amazes in many ways, not least in her willingness to expose herself physically as well as emotionally.   (Lumet told the whole crew to strip when filming her naked.  I said he would go to extremes for his cast).   Albert Finney’s role as the father of the two men slowly grows in importance, building to a powerful and properly melodramatic finale.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead  is exciting, engaging,  emotionally complex and visceral.    A good note, though hardly a grace note, to end Sydney Lumet’s remarkable career. 

The Constant Gardener still yields fruit.

I remember when I heard the first song on Desire, Bob Dylan’s  1976 album.  It was Hurricane.   His previous albums, New Morning, Dylan, Planet Waves and Blood On The Tracks, had been mainly albums of personal songs,  essentially about himself and his relationships.   But by writing Hurricane and taking up the cause of Rubin Carter, the boxer who had been jailed, and Dylan believed framed, for murder Dylan’s righteous indignation was reignited.  The song sears, his voice rasps and his artistry sours.     Carter’s conviction was eventually overturned, but that was 1986, and he could no longer stood a chance to ‘be the champion of the world’.  Dylan’s anger made my heart soar.

When I first read John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener in 2001  my heart rose and sank at the same time.     It rose because it seemed that le Carré  had also got his righteous mojo back - and anger improved his art too.     When the Cold War ended David Cornwell (le Carré  did not just lose a context, he lost a passion.     It was never simply an anti-Soviet passion; he was angry about the way the whole international Intelligence world operated on behalf of its governments, including of course his own.      

But in The Constant Gardener David Cornwell/ le Carré  had found something new to be angry about.     A former SIS man, Ted Younie, had told him about the ways Big Pharma used Africans as guinea pigs and falsified their clinical trials. ‘This book needs writing’ Younie had told Cornwell.    In his 2015 biography of Cornwell/ le Carré Adam Sisman wrote that ‘The more that David investigated the behavior of drug companies in Africa, the more outraged he became.  They dumped inappropriate or out-of-date medicines on the Africans, suppressed information about their contra-indications and their side-effects, and encouraged their indiscriminate use.  The most effective drugs were arbitrarily over-priced, and attempts to manufacture generic substitutes blocked.’  (p533)

Cornwell was also ‘shocked to discover how closely the industry was tied to Western Governments,   and    ‘David believed it possible that in extremis the most  unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies might to murder to silence their critics’. (ibid).  

Cornwell has always taken his research seriously, often putting his own safety at risk.   He went to Kenya to research this issue, also flying into South Sudan,  an area devastated by drought, famine and civil war (the first ‘water war’?).     He talked there to members of the United Nations Operation Lifeline Sudan,  and to local dignitaries and officials.   While at a food station it  was attacked by the mounted Janjaweed fighters and he was evacuated, along with the aid workers, to a nearby island.    

The Constant Gardener is an unashamedly campaigning novel.   Some critics faulted it for this,  but Dickens, Pasternak,  Solzhenitsyn,  James Baldwin and many others have written such committed books.    Surely it is a legitimate use of the form?   Be that as it may, it was Cornwell’s informed indictment of Big Pharma that made my heart sink, just as it was meant to.  

In 1974, while researching  The Honourable Schoolboy in Cambodia he had met a Frenchwoman, Yvette Pierpaoli, who ran a trading company mainly used to fly relief operations to refugees, many of them in besieged towns.  Cornwell flew with her, and saw that she was greeted there as a savior and saint, a friend who brought them hope as well as food.   

‘She had all the wiles’ Cornwell wrote, ‘She could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee.  She could tip you with a smile to melt your heart, cajole, flatter, and win you in any way you needed to be won.’     Yvette eventually became the model for Tessa Quayle, the heroine and wife of Justin, The Constant Gardener, and the portrayal of her ‘commitment to the poor of Africa, especially its women, her contempt for protocol, and her unswerving, often maddening, determination to have her way’  stemmed from Yvette’s example.   He had only been in Kenya for a few days when his wife  Jane called him to say that Yvette had died in a car accident.     The Constant Gardener is dedicated;  ‘For Yvette Pierpaoli, who lived and died giving a damn.’    So is the film that followed.

When the movie came out I watched it course, and was impressed.   I watched it again last night,  and was no less impressed.   The producer, Simon Channing Williams  had been brave enough to engage the Brazilian Fernando Meirrelles as Director,  following on from his City of God  and Blindness,  and Meirrelles brought in his own cinematographer from both of those films,  the Uruguayan Cesar Charlene.     The work they had done together in the barrios of Rio Janeiro, with hand help cameras and using crowds of local people, was utilized again shooting in Nairobi, where up to a million people lived in slums, without clean water or electricity.   

Cornwell worked extensively with the British screen-writer, Jeffrey Caine, for two years.   He later said ‘There’s hardly a line left, hardly a scene intact that comes from my novel.  Yet I don’t know a better translation from film to novel.’  (Sisman p540).  

Casting was crucial.   Rachel Weisz, as Tessa, won a Golden Globe for her performance.    Ranulph Fiennes as Justin Quayle managed to hold our belief in a character who goes through so many changes, a task made more difficult by the way the story is not told in chronological order.      Danny Huston is also persuasive as a man too easily led away from his honour and duty.

Some members of the cast and crew later set up a charity, The Constant Gardener Trust, with Cornwell, Meirelles, Fiennes and Weisz as patrons, providing  access to clean water and toilets in parts of the Nairobi slums and funding a secondary school in Loiyangalani  on the bank of Lake Turkana, where some of the film was shot.

In an afterword to the novel Cornwell wrote ‘As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.’  

Have things changed since?  

The fictional plot about a corrupt drug company touting a supposed cure for tuberculosis (TB) anticipates the more recent lawsuit brought by the Nigerian Government against Pfizer for $7 bn alleging that an experimental antibiotic to treat meningitis led to death and disability in a group of children. 

For a more recent view I refer you to Dylan Mohan Gray’s  2013 documentary Fire In The Blood  ‘ an intricate tale of "medicine, monopoly and malice".  It tells the story of how Western pharmaceutical companies and governments blocked access to low-cost AIDS drugs for the countries of the global south in the years after 1996 - causing ten million or more unnecessary deaths - and the improbable group of people who decided to fight back. Shot on four continents and including contributions from global figures such as Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Joseph Stiglitz, Fire In The Blood is the never-before-told true story of the remarkable coalition which came together to stop 'the crime of the century' and save millions of lives in the process. (IMdb)

This film also told the story of a well-known South African judge,  Edwin Cameron, who was near death from AIDS in the mid-‘90s but survived.   He understands that this was because he is a white man with a first world-scale salary, who could afford the expensive patent-protected drugs made by Big Pharma companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb that gave him his life back.  He’s also a resident of the continent where people who could not afford to pay thousands of dollars for those drugs have died on a nearly unbelievable scale.

By some reputable estimates, 10 million men, women and children died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa between 1997 and 2003, when drugs that could have saved their lives already existed and were abundant in other parts of the world. While Cameron was receiving medicine, poor people who lived a few miles away from him in the South African townships were told to go home and die. This happened entirely because the drug companies decided that protecting their bottom-line profits was more important than saving lives, and because there was no moral force with the global power to stop them. To put those 10 million deaths in perspective, almost 15 times as many people died of AIDS in Africa during that period than have died in the United States over the entire 32-year history of the epidemic.

 Allowing less expensive versions to be manufactured and sold in the developing world would have involved a tacit admission that the entire price structure was an extortionate fiction.   As early as the year 2000, Indian pharmaceutical entrepreneur Yusuf Hamied offered to supply generic versions of antiretroviral medications to African countries at a cost of $800 per patient per year, about 5 percent of the price charged in the West.  Even though the Big Pharma companies sold almost no patented drugs in Africa and had no profits to lose in those countries by permitting generics, they still refused.   Hamied would later lower his price to $350 a year, less than a dollar a day, which was when things started to change.

I now read drug companies slaverin over he vast profits to be mae by aellinf their stuff to the growing monied African middle class. 

On a positive note, the popularity of both book and film of The Constant Gardener helped, we are told, to raise consciousness of the Pharma’s bad behavior in Africa, and help the cause of those campaigning in the UN for change.

Where does The Constant Gardener fit in the le Carré canon?   It is not up their with The Spy who Came In From The Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,   but I do think it was a turnin point in his subsequent career.

  

After the ‘fall of the Wall’ Cornwell/ le Carré wrote Our Game, (1995) concerned with, among other things,  the nationalist chaos in the Caucasus that followed Soviet disintegration,  (there was some passion there),

The Night Manager, (1993) was essentially a thriller about the illegal (but unofficially tolerated) arms trade, recently updated and made into a BBC 6 part series.

The Tailor of Panama, (1996) almost a Graham Greene ‘entertainment’, filmed in 2001 by John Boorman,

Single & Single  (1998)  was a complex reworking of his complex relationship with his con-man father.

But after The Constant Gardener (2001) came; ,

Absolute Friends,  (2003) linking globalisation and terrorism,

The Mission Song, (2006) a much more focused book about Western interests exploiting The Congo and Rwanda,  

A Most Wanted Man (2008, well filmed in 2011 by Anton Corbijn, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final role) raging against  ‘extraordinary extradition’ and the over-arching power of the US,    

Our Kind of Traitor  (2010) about post-Soviet gangster capitalism,

and  A Delicate Truth, (2013)  of which the Kirkus Review remarked that le Carré "resolutely keeping potential action sequences just offstage," and "focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence community."  

That moral rot has been a semi-constant motif, and I think the central cause of Cornwell’s ongoing anger.      As an ex-spy he well knows that you cannot trust spies, even when they are on your side,  when seem to behave like Honourable Schoolboys or when you are their Absolute Friend.      Like The Secret Pilgrim he knows that his own ethical standards and patriotic loyalty have been too often compromised and betrayed by those in power, both those unelected ‘officers’ of MI5 and MI6 and the politicians seduced by them when offered the lie that they have been ‘let in to the secret circles’.    

I have written another article (Blind and bigoted) about the way The Constant Gardener film was entirely misused to illustrate a racist, even eugenicist, article written by an American retired professor.  

As a footnote, it strikes me as odd that two films starring Fiennes, The Constant Gardener  and The English Patient (1996),  start with a dead woman,  beloved of Fiennes’ character, and in both we have to  wait until the end to see how her life  and his actually ended.       

Having revisited both movies I comment you to do the same.

Blind and Bigoted view of The Constant Gardener

In an article published in Occidental Observer, White Identity, Interests and Culture, entitled Moral and Aesthetic Idealism among Whites: The Constant Gardener, Kevin MacDonald wrote that

‘Although Tessa gets married to the White diplomat, (Justin Quayle, the Constant Gardener)  her heart is in all things African.  We see her flirting with an African doctor, openly consorting with him at a high-level cocktail party, then opting to have his baby in a hospital swarming with poor Africans, except for the White nurses and doctors. The birth of the baby happens as though it is part of the natural order of things—the husband is just fine with it, acting as if there’s nothing to notice, while the father of the baby looks on proudly. Tessa’s only thought is to help the poor African girl in the next room.  Oddly, we are given only brief glimpses of the baby—as if the director didn’t think the audience would be quite ready to relate to the child of a married White woman and her very African lover.

One can’t help feeling the tension in the scene with the miscegenated baby. We expect at least that Justin would feel anger and betrayal, perhaps get a divorce and somehow find a way to get this experience behind him.

Adopting non-White children and sponsoring poor and oppressed immigrants to the West is nothing if not fashionable.  Again, the power of the media to intensify or minimize our natural tendencies.  Wearing badges identifying one as an upholder of contemporary moral conventions is an excellent way to win the respect and adulation of others.

If you have ever seen the film or read the book you will immediately see how he has failed to grasp the plot.

MacDonald then goes on to say that

Everything we know about psychology shows that our rational faculties can suppress our evolved tendencies.    Moral and aesthetic universalism are no different as biological tendencies among Whites that need to be controlled in order to produce adaptive behavior—no different, say, from controlling ethnocentrism or our evolved mating psychology.   A great deal of psychological research shows that White people do in fact engage in effortful control of ethnocentrism, usually to protect their reputation in politically correct environments like universities.

These biological tendencies can be controlled. And the fact that such traits are hardly universal among Whites will make it all the easier. But first we have to obtain a media presence where we can clearly and articulately make the argument for moral and aesthetic particularism as a rational necessity in the modern world’.

‘As if the director didn’t think the audience would be quite ready to relate to the child of a married White woman and her very African lover?’  And    ‘the miscegenated baby?     Did you notice that white is always ‘White’ and the word black, or Black, does not appear?     

Of course this as racist.     In The Occidental Review’s mission statement I read that

The Occidental Observer will present original content touching on the themes of white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West.  Such a mission statement is sure to be dismissed as extremism of the worst sort in today’s intellectual climate—perhaps even as a sign of psychiatric disorder. Yet there is a compelling need for such a site. A great many other identifiable groups in the multicultural West have a strong sense of identity and interest, but overt expressions of white identity and white interests (or European-American identity and interests) are rarely found among the peoples who founded these societies and who continue to make up the majority.

This is a completely unnatural state of affairs—the result of a prolonged assault on the legitimacy of these concepts by cultural elites that have dominated public discourse on issues of race and ethnicity since before World War II.  We reject labels such as “white supremacist” or “racist” that are routinely bestowed on assertions of white identity and interests as a means of muzzling their expression.  All peoples have ethnic interests and all peoples have a legitimate right to assert their interests, to construct societies that reflect their culture, and to define the borders of their kinship group.’

So MacDonald has used The Constant Gardener to illustrate his theme.   He sees But he  utterly misunderstood what he had seen.    He is wrong about the paternity of the child – and indeed, even its maternity.   He is wrong about the relationship between Tessa and Albert, her African colleague, and about Albert’s sexual orientation. Her child is stillborn, we never see him.  The child she is nursing in the hospital belongs to a sick African girl in the next bed.   We then see the African grandmother carrying the child at the start of a 40 kilometre trek home.   Tessa has no child to take home.    Justin is relieved to discover that Albert is  gay – and in a committed relationship with a man.    All of this is clear in the film.

Why do I make such a fuss?  Because Kevin MacDonald is  Editor of The Occidental Observer a the much published  writer an retired Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach.    Much of his work has centred on Judaism, and has been seen as anti-Semitic. 

I am happy to report that according to Wiki  ‘The university's psychology department, as well as the California State University, Long Beach academic senate, voted to formally dissociate themselves from his work in 2008.     The academic senate issued the following statement:

"While the academic senate defends Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s academic freedom and freedom of speech, as it does for all faculty, it firmly and unequivocally disassociates itself from the anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric views he has expressed."  

Bur isn’t it strange, and even frightening, that a man with such academic  record and intelligence cannot even follow the plot of a movie?   

As my grandmother used to say ‘there’s none so blind as them as don’t want to see!’  Or who only see what they want to see.  

On a positive note, the popularity of both book and film of The Constant Gardener helped, we are told, to raise consciousness of the Pharma’s behavior in Africa, and the cause of those campaigning for change in the UN.