On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the greater New Orleans area.

On August 30th Kanye West released Late Registration, three days ahead of saying “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” on a live Katrina telethon.

On August 31st THE CONSTANT GARDENER came out.

I had not seen this one before. It’s not quite my type of movie, but it’s a good one. The stylish Brazilian crime saga CITY OF GOD (released in the U.S. in 2003) had been a sensation and its producer, Walter Salles, came to Hollywood to make DARK WATER. Meanwhile its co-director Fernando Meirelles was making this British movie set and filmed partly in Kenya. Based on a then-recent (2001) novel by John le Carré (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), adapted by Jeffrey Caine (GOLDENEYE), THE CONSTANT GARDENER is not exactly a spy movie, but a drama involving a murder mystery, a conspiracy, and international intrigue.

The first thing I noticed is that it’s kind of arty. Meirelles, cinematographer César Charlone (also following up CITY OF GOD) and editor Claire Simpson (C.H.U.D., PLATOON, BLACK BEAUTY) immediately create an aggressive style, following a brief opening at an airport with a puzzling collection of beautiful images of the aftermath of a car accident, shot from deliberately disorienting perspectives and angles, and intercut with hypnotic shots of a flock of birds.

When we return to our protagonist, British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes, SCHINDLER’S LIST, STRANGE DAYS, THE AVENGERS, SPIDER), he’s unnervingly framed what seemed to me just a little bit wrong, just barely cutting off the top of his head. It’s very subtle about it but it’s not gonna let you get comfortable right away.

The second thing I noticed is wow – that title really is literal, and explained immediately. Justin keeps futzing with his plants until his friend, British High Commissioner Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston, BIRTH, THE AVIATOR), tells him to knock it off for a minute because he’s trying to tell him that his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz, THE MUMMY, CONSTANTINE) and her driver are believed to have been killed.

The third thing I noticed is man, this Justin Quayle guy is inhumanly kind. He doesn’t break down, but gently thanks Sandy for delivering the news, saying it must’ve been hard for him. Later, after Justin identifies Tessa’s mutilated corpse, it’s Sandy who pukes, and Justin who comforts him.

Don’t worry, Rachel Weisz is actually in the movie. It skips back to show us Justin and Tessa’s meet cute, when she went to his speaking engagement and harangued him about Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War to the point that everyone else got uncomfortable and walked out. Justin invited her for coffee and they ended up fucking (that day?) and later marrying. While posted in Kenya, Tessa (who works for Amnesty International or something similar?) helps with HIV testing and other humanitarian aid programs, befriends Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé, LA HAINE), and starts confronting pharmaceutical bigshots about their corruption at fancy-ass parties. Sandy tells Justin to make her stop. (IMPLIED SPOILER do you think the Danny Huston character might turn out to be a bad guy? I had some hunches about it based on the fact that the Danny Huston character is played by Danny Huston.)

In the present Sandy implies that Tessa might’ve been having an affair with Arnold, and in the past we see her seemingly flirting with him, but also with Sandy, even while pregnant. There are clearly secrets being kept, and much like TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY it doesn’t spell everything out for us immediately, it leaves us hanging for a while, but I was able to keep track of things better here. Justin is very mysterious the way he finds incriminating evidence about an affair in an email and a letter and tries to confirm it for himself but stays calm and never says anything about it to anybody. And there’s one part where for a minute they make us think Tessa had another man’s baby (SPOILER she’s holding an African woman’s baby at the hospital). Then we find out what’s really going on and you see the movie sitting there trying to act all nonchalant about it. Yeah, you knew what you were doing, movie. Don’t play dumb.

Now Justin has to dig into all that to figure out who killed Tessa and why. The why involves uncovering information about foreign drug companies doing harmful testing on Kenyans without their consent, so learning the truth will put him in danger too. Some of the great character actors like Bill Nighy (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER, UNDERWORLD) and Pete Postlethwaite (last seen in DARK WATER) show up in small but crucial roles. The trail sends Justin traveling around to meet with people in different parts of Africa and there’s a bunch of documentary-looking stuff filmed with locals on location in Loiyangalani and Kibera, Nairobi.

Somewhere in the middle I thought I was kinda losing interest, but man does it pick up, and it has a really top shelf conclusion that somehow combines a cynical gut punch with a triumphant stick-it-to-the-man ending.

This is definitely an important movie because future best actress winner Lupita Nyong’o, then in her early twenties, was a P.A. on it. It also made money, got great reviews, and got Weisz an Oscar, plus nominations for best adapted screenplay, original score and editing. Watching it in this retrospective it strikes me as interesting as the only movie of the summer that directly addresses the Iraq War (and bluntly criticizes it), while also painting western governments and corporations as exploitative of Africans. By coincidence it opened right when the George W. Bush administration’s abject failure to handle the disaster in New Orleans finally pierced that asshole’s weird public opinion indestructibility and began his downfall.

There had been a few other movies that summer that could be read as primal screams about the era: the economic inequality of LAND OF THE DEAD, the temporary societal collapse of WAR OF THE WORLDS, the irredeemable evil of THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, the fantastical anti-war sentiments of HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE. And just on the basis of what George Lucas had been saying with his story since the ‘70s REVENGE OF THE SITH ended up being seen by me and others as a parable about the consolidation of power after 9-11. It was a crazy time and movies were starting to catch up to that fact.

But also, you know, we had our nerd movies, and we had sorta half-assed movies about the Duke Boys and Herbie the Love Bug and motorcycles going off jumps. As always, the culture moves in many different currents. Depending on your mood you can see it as a needed escape during tough times or a pathetic act of denial and ignorance. I chose the latter interpretation in my September 1st column “Memories of the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards haunt me as Hurricane Katrina destroys New Orleans.” I’m not proud of every word I wrote in the thing (especially one starting with ‘r’ that I stopped using long ago) but it’s a hell of a time capsule. The VMAs were filmed in Miami, and might have been cancelled if the tropical storm had gone in a different direction. Instead they went on as planned, which meant an extreme display of opulence in keeping with the persona of host Sean “Diddy” Combs (who I’m happy to say I had nothing but disdain for even though I didn’t know how bad he really was).

There were red carpet arrivals with stars in exotic sports cars that they drove onto a turntable to be ogled. “The only thing more ridiculous than this is the realization that somebody probaly had to pack the cars on a truck and drive them from Los Angeles to Miami during a hurricane so Ludacris or somebody could get in and drive it 50 feet for the cameras,” I wrote.

On stage was an over-the-top spectacle with water fountains, blowtorches and acrobats. Diddy kept saying “Anything can happen!” and an example was that he gave his jeweled watch to some guy in the audience. After a commercial break he explained that security didn’t think he really meant it and got the watch back but he really meant it, he said, so he gave the guy the watch again. Important to do it on camera again.

I wrote that “Snoop Dogg introduced some poor sap up and coming comedian who had to do about two minutes of jokes. Of course he completely bombed, because what the fuck are you doing coming out doing miniaturized standup at an awards show?” I looked it up and it turns out the comedian was Dane Cook. So it didn’t ruin his career I guess. Anyway, one of my predictions for the future ended up being accurate in ways I never could’ve guessed:

“Paris Hilton and Little Bow Wow introduced one of the very few awards that were given out, but first they compared the jewelry they were wearing and talked about how many karats each item was. If you think the world sucks now, wait until we have a generation of adults who grew up idolizing Paris Hilton and Donald Trump, watching tv shows about tricked out cars and rapper’s mansions.“

Another disgraced sex criminal who was involved was R. Kelly doing “the craziest thing in this whole fuckin mess,” a bizarre lip sync of “Trapped in the Closet,” for some reason introduced by Eric Roberts (BEST OF THE BEST).

Kanye West won best male video for “Jesus Walks” and I did not yet have an opinion of him but I mentioned that he “said in his speech that he had made two videos for the particular song. He did not ask which video won the award, though. Because who gives a shit.”

I said in the column that “there was exactly one shocking moment in this whole freak show,” when someone from Green Day (winning for a video off of their anti-Bush concept album American Idiot) mentioned wanting the soldiers to come home safe. “At this point even I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, that’s right, there’s a war in Iraq.’ It never even occurred to me as a possibility that somebody might mention the war or the president or anything that has any real meaning to anybody.”

I found it to be a poetic statement about the country at the time that MTV was putting on this display of profane excess while on all the other channels regular people were sheltering in the Superdome among waste and bodies, or clinging to the roofs of their flooded homes, waiting for rescuers who might never come because they or their funding were busy on the other side of the world murdering Iraqis. And because “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” it sure seemed like. It was so subversive to blurt that out in the polite company of Mike Meyers and live television, but twenty years later not caring about Black people is the official stance of the government. ‘Cause it’s “DEI” or “woke” and therefore illegal. 2005’s feverish nightmare is like one of six terrible things you read about every day in 2025.

Overall Summer 2025 was not one of the better collections of movies I’ve done a summer retrospective on, but not a terrible one either. Most of the also-rans are pretty bland, but there are a handful of movies here that I consider classics that I will continue to rewatch. Doing this series made twenty years seem like a lifetime ago in some respects (the shitty popular music and digital FX mostly) but also it seems like not that long ago in the sense that I didn’t change my mind much on any of the movies that I reviewed at the time (except, sadly, really not liking LAND OF THE DEAD much anymore).

If there’s a lesson we (or I guess Hollywood) can take from that summer it’s that there should be more room for blockbusters that are the personal vision of directors. REVENGE OF THE SITH, BATMAN BEGINS and WAR OF THE WORLDS were all big hits based on supposed i.p. but they were unique takes that nobody else would’ve done (and nobody has really matched since).

And if there’s a lesson we can take from it culturally it’s that when the world is on fire there will be great art to address it and vapid trash that ignores it and we gotta hang in there because a reprieve might be closer than we think. Darth Vader ain’t gonna last in that suit forever, the tripods might catch a cold, and the chocolate factory could be ours some day, so we gotta be constant gardeners, working patiently to cultivate what we want to grow here in the future. Or something.

Thanks for reading SUMMER 2005 – I’m happy to be done (a couple weeks late) but I had a good time visiting the season of vengeance and NASCAR with you. See you next fall.

APPENDIX – SUMMER 2005 SUPERLATIVES

Most satisfying rewatches:

HUSTLE & FLOW
WAR OF THE WORLDS
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE
BATMAN BEGINS
UNLEASHED

Best new to me:

LORDS OF DOGTOWN

Most surprising kinda-liked:

THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS

Most improved:

THE BROTHERS GRIMM I guess

Weirdest movie I watched:

Probly THE ADVENTURES OF SHARKBOY AND LAVAGIRL

Weirdest thing I learned:

That Martin Short plays a dual role of Jiminy Glick and David Lynch in JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD