Catch a Fire

A form of waterboarding is approved for government use. Prisoners are held indefinitely. A tortured prisoner dies of a "weak heart." His friend, whose wife is tortured too, is so appalled that he joins a resistance movement.

That's the fact-based plot of the riveting new drama, "Catch a Fire." But the movie is not set in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. It takes place in South Africa in the 1980s, during the end of the apartheid years, around the same time that then-congressman Dick Cheney was voting against the release of Nelson Mandela and the recognition of the African National Congress.

It's the story of one of Mandela's prison mates, Patrick Chamusso, who was brutalized and suspected of terrorism long before he joined the resistance. The early scenes dramatize the daily humiliations inflicted on black men who didn't want to be "Uncle Toms" but were too frightened to fight back.

After a terrorist bombing at the Secunda oil refinery, Chamusso is picked up by the police, who are less effective with physical torture than they are at threatening his family. Eventually he tells them a story he thinks they want to hear.

Smoothly directed by Phillip Noyce, the Australian filmmaker who made "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and the Michael Caine remake of "The Quiet American," the movie relies heavily on well-staged action sequences and two gifted actors to keep its familiar tale from appearing stale.

Like "Rabbit-Proof Fence," which dealt with aborigines persecuted by white officials in 1930s Australia, "Catch a Fire" has a fascinating racist villain who can't seem to stop himself. In place of Kenneth Branagh's persistent bureaucrat, Noyce offers the equally relentless Col. Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), who at first appears to be sympathetic in his dealings with Chamusso (Derek Luke).

Working for police security, Vos positions himself as a realist who claims that apartheid can't last because South African whites are outnumbered. "We're the underdogs," he says in one scene. He talks openly about trying to save black men from the gallows. But will his words ever register as loudly as his actions?

Both men have wary wives whose behavior adds tension and complexity to the simpler struggle at the center of the movie. Vos' wife is deeply unsettled by a nighttime break-in. Chamusso's wife fears, with some reason, that she may never see her husband again when he flees to Mozambique.

The screenwriter, Shawn Slovo, used her own experiences to write the 1988 apartheid classic, "A World Apart." The details of living under apartheid are again quite vivid; even before the Chamusso family is directly involved, the hatred and bigotry surrounding them could not be more oppressive.

Co-produced by a couple of Oscar-winning directors, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, "Catch a Fire" makes the politically incorrect point that torture does work — though the result may not be what the torturers had in mind. In addition to supplying information (some of it accurate), the victims are often radicalized by the experience. They're quite likely to bite back.

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