We saw The Constant Gardener this week end and can highly recommend it. Ralph Fiennes is wonderful as a grieving man holding on to his basic decency, and Rachel Weisz just sparkles as his wife.
Now Elizabeth knows I have always hated movies where the wife exists solely to be killed off in order to motivate her husband to grab the nearest sword, musket or fighter jet and kill a lot of people: Braveheart, The Patriot, Independence Day, and The Gladiator come to mind. And Tessa is murdered at the beginning of The Constant Gardener. The difference is that Justin does not grab a weapon and kill people. He goes about trying to find out what happened, and he does his best to finish the mission his wife started. Along the way we see flashbacks that tell us why she was so important to him. In the end he really can't live without her.
This is the closest I could come to a related poem:
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring in the Garden
Ah, cannot the curled shoots of the larkspur that you loved so,
Cannot the spiny poppy that no winter kills
Instruct you how to return through the thawing ground and the thin snow
Into this April sun that is driving the mist between the hills?
A good friend to the monkshood in a time of need
You were, and the lupine’s friend as well;
But I see the lupine lift the ground like a tough weed
And the earth over the monkshood swell,
And I fear that not a root in all this heaving sea
Of land, has nudged you where you lie, has found
Patience and time to direct you, numb and stupid as you still must be
From your first winter underground.
