How does an innocent man with no thought of committing a crime get turned into an insurgent, a “terrorist”? For Patrick Chamusso, it happens when he’s arrested after a bombing at the coal mine at which he is a supervisor -- we know he had nothing to do with it, we know he was elsewhere at the time, but his alibi, for all its truth, is shaky, and the white South African police, and in particular antiterrorism specialist Nic Vos, are disinclined to believe him anyway. He is tortured, in more ways than one, until Vos is convinced that he had nothing to do with the bombing. He’s free, but Patrick’s life is ruined: Vos’s mistrust has infected Patrick’s wife, and even more importantly, Patrick’s complacency is shattered. Where once he was willing to smooth over the injustices of his world, now he has, well, caught the fire of revolt. He joins the African National Congress -- freedom fighters to some, terrorists to others -- and becomes preciously what Vos had feared he was.

It’s fear, of course, at the root of the social and political disaster of South Africa at the time -- much is made, in the script by Shawn Slovo, daughter of one of the (white) leaders of the ANC, of the inevitability of the eventual overthrown of the white minority by the black majority. Vos is the first one to mention this in the film, in fact, and -- as played by Tim Robbins; I’ve never heard him do an accent before, but he pulls off the Afrikaans beautifully, to my ear -- he is a man driven by fear. He’s not quite the sociopath his colleagues are -- while they would have been content to decide that Chamusso was the terrorist they were looking for when they arrested him, just for the sheer thrill of hanging a black man, any black man, Vos is at least concerned with getting the real perpetrator off the streets. But that doesn’t spring from a sense of justice but from a genuine terror for his family -- he’s trying to put off as long as possible the inevitable loss of the extraordinary privilege his family enjoys at the expense of others who are increasingly angry themselves about this upside-side state. Robbins (War of the Worlds, Code 46) swaggers as Vos, but lets us see how shaky his confidence is. And yet there is no compassion, on the part of Slovo or director Phillip Noyce -- whose Rabbit-Proof Fence a few years ago was another startling film about rebellion against howling injustice -- and there is no excuse offered for Vos. And he is, thank the gods of satisfying storytelling (if not those that may watch over the real world), stubbornly unrepetent till the end; he gets no reprieve, undergoes no Hollywood change of heart.

The film belongs to Derek Luke, though, as Chamusso. The physical torture he suffers is nothing to what he endures emotionally and psychologically, as he barrels through multiple realignments of his worldview, and Luke (Friday Night Lights, Antwone Fisher) brings a power both fragile and heartrending to this man forces to confront demons both internal and external that he would likely have continued tiptoeing around his entire life. And the place at which he ends up... I don’t want to give away the ending, but if you know anything about how postapartheid South Africa has dealt with the crimes of the past, how the nation has attempted to heal and move on, then you’ll have a hint of stunning force of the seemingly unpretentious attitude that suffuses Chamusso by the end (one that an onscreen appearance by the real Chamusso only amplifies).

If there’s a message to Catch a Fire, it might be: Oppressors and occupiers beware, and know that whatever you dish out will come back to you threefold. It leaves you wondering, to know how the white minority has fared in South Africa after apartheid, whether the people of Iraq will ever feel the same way about America.

(Technorati tags: Catch a Fire, Derek Luke, Tim Robbins, South Africa, apartheid, torture)