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Trailer for "Catch a Fire"

The analogies between events in Phillip Noyce’s fine new thriller about South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, Catch a Fire, and aspects of the current American political scene will be obvious enough even to a moviegoer only modestly aware of public affairs.

To begin with, there’s the movie’s depiction of a governmental campaign to identify and root out secret anti-regime fighters. Then there are the methods employed: Detention without charges filed or legal representation of those arrested, as well as modes of interrogation that would never pass muster by Amnesty International or anyone with even a crude sense of the requirements of civilized standards. And then there is the government’s insistence that the resistance to apartheid is fomented and exploited by a subversive, treacherous, foreign organization bent on destroying a just way of life.

At times, Catch a Fire fairly resonates with contemporary relevance. Some of its audience may respond on those terms alone, but the film’s effectiveness is far greater and more complex.

It is, for one thing, a crackerjack piece of filmmaking —perhaps Noyce’s best— that is tightly constructed and fluidly propelled. But it’s more than a politically resonant and suspenseful genre entry. The movie was clearly intended to address important ethical and moral problems and to illuminate the obscured recesses of human behavior in very difficult circumstances. The movie’s provenance helps to explain this effort.

It relates the fact-based story of Patrick Chamusso (a compelling Derek Luke), a young, black foreman at an oil refinery and a husband and parent. Chamusso is almost studiedly apolitical, even enduring derisive comments from his co-workers about his too-acquiescent, “Tom”-like behavior.

This doesn’t save him from arrest and harsh mistreatment after a sabotage attempt at the refinery. The police even savagely assault his pretty wife, Precious (Bonnie Henna). Released when it becomes obvious he is innocent, Chamusso is deeply embittered and decides to become the very thing his oppressors had feared: A resistance fighter.

The film is most concerned with his story, but it also attempts to examine the motivations of the largely white, Boer (descendants of Dutch settlers) authorities who have imposed racial separation and deprivation and who take the punitive measures to maintain them. The filmmakers have counterposed a police colonel named Nic Vos (a composite invention) to Chamusso’s character.

Expertly incarnated by Tim Robbins, Vos is intelligent, determined, clever and sometimes ruthlessly cruel in his pursuit of resistance members. The film is careful to show his devotion to family and his conviction that Communists are behind the black militance and rebellion. Robbins’ performance is chillingly persuasive and fine-tuned, but Vos remains rather remote from explication, as exemplified by one late shot of him sitting alone by a lake. The best the film can do is make us aware of human adaptability to evil and savagery, especially when countenanced by law and ideology.

The movie was written by Shawn Slovo, whose late father Joe Slovo was a white comrade-in-arms of the black freedom fighters and a minister in Nelson Mandela’s post-liberation government. He was also an actual Communist, as opposed to the “Reds” South African whites feared could be found under every black person’s bed. He was the one who suggested to his daughter Shawn that she write about Chamusso.

Catch a Fire is expertly crafted, and if it doesn’t really reveal much about the wellsprings of brutality and depravity, or the courage to resist, it does offer convincing glimpses of personal and social responses to terrible challenges. It vibrates with ethical impulses that may bring to mind recent American political deformations and constitutional insults, but which transcend any one national situation.