The Zeal Thing

Oh, no, look out. There she goes again.

Tessa is about to let 'er rip. It's so embarrassing. Doesn't the poor girl know that one just doesn't do certain things? Not Tessa. She has no sense of what's appropriate.

So Tessa arises and begins to assail the poor chap from the Foreign Office in the middle of his dreary lecture. Doesn't he realize, she demands, that British foreign policy is a sham driven by corporate greed and narrow-minded nationalism? Doesn't he realize that people are dying, dying, and all the government cares about is keeping football hooligans employed in Scottish factories? Doesn't he see the deep, the profound, the complete immorality of it all . . .

ZZZZZZZZ-zzzzzz-ZZZZZ!

Tessa (played brilliantly by Rachel Weisz) breaks down in tears at her audience's indifference and her quarry's affronted bafflement. The scene is from Fernando Meirelles's version of the John le Carre novel "The Constant Gardener," which opened this week; it's a fascinating grown-up film that examines, among other things, the nature of zealotry.

He's not a familiar figure like a cowboy, a samurai or a naked lady. He's not even up there with detectives, pilots, presidents and lawyers. But still: Movies quite often have a sniff of politics to them, and a figure they seem to come back to time and again is the moral crusader, the fellow who dreams of things as they can be in their idealized state. Noble as that sounds, the truth is, such men and women have been, over time, rarely portrayed as noble.

"The Constant Gardener" is a case in point. In fact, if the film had left off where I stopped describing, you could say it represents a clear theory of zealotry. It begins with a close observation of the phenomenon. The zealot -- strident Tessa, hurling thunderbolts of rage at her queasy target -- isn't just a lass who cares; rather she cares perhaps too much. She can't leave it alone. Drama is etched in her forehead, her eyes track injustice everywhere, her medium is anger, her weapons scorn and sarcasm, she knows how right she is, and her signal frustration is that nobody cares. They are sooooo-oooo stupid!

The zealot, political or otherwise but usually political, is usually a very unhappy camper. Breakdown is never far away. The voice cracks, the eyes well with tears, the sentences, so propelled by anger, lapse toward incoherence. When the inevitable rejection is encountered, the whole body seems to deflate, and every line seems altered. It's the weight of carrying all that misery around, finally too much to bear. Weisz gets this brilliantly, and when her Tessa deconstructs to a moody puddle after the hoots of the crowd wear her down, you can feel that her pain is soul-deep.

We know: She's got some screws loose. Though implicit, the psychological reasons are transparent. We can assume it all goes back to the family. If our boy or our girl has some major issue with a cruel and tyrannical dad or mum, inevitably that fury transfers itself to the state. Thus your zealot is always someone working out his surrogate dramas in the arena of politics as pure compensation. Had the poor kid been hugged once or twice, told a bedtime story or two, tucked in, allowed to cuddle on stormy nights, none of this would have happened, from Tessa's hissy fit at the man from the Foreign Office to the storming of the Winter Palace, the execution of the Kulaks and the show trials. It all belongs on the same continuum and once there, it's really only a matter of degree.

Other messinesses attend this personality disorder, and to some degree the first part of "The Constant Gardener" is a clinic on the condition. It seems always a part of the package that such angry people are usually somewhat messy in their personal life. Tessa is no exception; she's almost a stereotype -- she's promiscuous, flamboyantly so, and her eventual husband, that dreary Foreign Office chap Justin, played by Ralph Fiennes -- goes into the books as a cuckold, the chump who's last to know. Then, too, she's reckless: She'll beard anyone, anywhere, anytime, and begin to argue. She'll venture upcountry and unarmed in pursuit of something she perceives as "truth," and it's only a matter of time before, sooner or later, she gets knocked off. She's a mess.

This is actually a fairly common portrait in the movies. Think of the many other radicals the flicks have portrayed as loose cannons with messy lives, full of small treacheries against people while yapping moral triumphalism in favor of some mythical animal called The People.

In "Silkwood," Karen Silkwood was a mess; in "Norma Rae," Norma Rae was a mess. Think of the angry young man, Perchik, the one the second daughter goes off to marry in Siberia in "Fiddler on the Roof." Really, didn't you know he was a mess and the poor girl was heading off 2,000 miles to the Arctic Circle to her own doom? You knew that, didn't you?