Film - Black-and-white morality takes on an unexpected colour, writes John Lyttle The Constant Gardener (15)

The Constant Gardener is the latest white man's burden movie so, of course, Ralph Fiennes plays the male lead. Well, who could be whiter? Or politer? Fiennes always acts as if the person closest to him in a scene has just broken wind violently and he's far too well bred to mention it. That's what made him such witty casting as the serial killer in Red Dragon. Fiennes looked as if he might murmur, "Would you mind terribly?" before knifing your entire family. It was hard to hold multiple murder against him when his exquisitely pained refinement meant that he suffered more than any victim. If you've seen The English Patient, Onegin and The End of the Affair, you will know what I mean: the slight jaw-clenching, the subtle eye-widening, the sudden head-holding so suitable for both the big Shakespearean roles and TV ads for migraine medication. Fiennes is routinely praised for understatement when he's, actually, awfully blatant about being bottled-up.

And what's the cause of this permanent vague disgust, anyway? I'd guess the coarseness of modern life (and perhaps the way people keep mispronouncing his first name). Which would certainly explain why Fiennes has never seemed all there in contemporary parts. Start analysing, and nearly everything about the star is anachronistic: the trained voice, the classical profile, the constipated 1950s air of polite detachment. Only Fiennes could star as a small-time crook in the futuristic thriller Strange Days and somehow transmute sci-fi into costume drama. Fiennes can't do common - his Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1992) is camper than Dale Winton at a Judy Garland convention - and he never quite fits the here- and-now, either. His period dress might be invisible, but audiences can hear the rustle of silk and the scratch of tweed whenever the port is passed. From the left, naturally.

All of which makes him perfect casting for The Constant Gardener. As a minor British diplomat, Justin Quayle, Fiennes is called upon to be gallant, and who better to personify such an irredeemably old-fashioned notion? This middle-aged stiff of a hero shouldn't really work, but then the same could be said of the picture itself. The author, John le Carre, is chilly and his characters calculated, while the City of God director, Fernando Meirelles, is hot and his protagonists untrammelled: they act without thinking, a cardinal sin in the le Carre universe. The chemical combination ought to be toxic.

Far from it. Meirelles tugs le Carre's ciphers out of the corridors of power and adjacent offices and deep into the vivid yet weirdly drained landscape of northern Kenya. Previous celluloid adaptations of the writer's novels have tended to take the work at its own estimation and been on the stately side: see The Russia House and The Little Drummer Girl, or better still, don't. Meirelles uses hand-held camera, natural lighting and improvised dialogue, and gets the actors moving. The authenticity that Meirelles brought to the dirt-poor townships of Rio de Janeiro, he brings to poverty-stricken Africa. This proves a welcome distraction from the plot, which involves a pharmaceutical company secretly testing an experimental Aids drug on Kenya's poor, and Quayle's wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), uncovering the deception and being raped and murdered for her pains.

Weisz is splendid, although the part is impossible. We're elbowed to admire Tessa because she's the sort of fearless political firebrand who insults corrupt government officials at embassy parties; but instead she's an irritating cardboard saint: Naomi Klein with cleavage all the way to her ankles. Quayle suspects that she has been unfaithful with a local doctor (John Sibi-Okumu) and his boss (Danny Huston) in pursuit of the facts, but when this transpires not to be true - Tessa is prissily Victorian for a woman who hopped into bed with Quayle minutes after meeting him - you begin to wonder about the good sense of the reviewers who praised the book for its searing realism.

If the novel had been about a deluded man waking up to his wife's adultery and still being willing to die to avenge her memory, then the story might have been about something. It's rather a Boys' Own conceit without the infidelity. The good behave decorously in their personal and public lives, and the bad aren't just corporate villains: they're, oh dear, rotters.

Small wonder that le Carre once wrote a book entitled The Honourable Schoolboy. His sophistication remains pretty sixth-form for a writer presently stroked for achieving moral maturity - meaning that he's given up his signature gradations of grey for a literal black and white. The odd thing is that the film version of The Constant Gardener both disguises and exposes this fault, and it's this very paradox that renders it smarter and deeper than its source material. That and Fiennes, whose courtliness finally - and almost miraculously - seems less of a sad joke and more of a stinging rebuke.

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