Catch a Fire
Phillip Noyce's "Catch a Fire" shares its name with the classic Bob Marley record. The record is better, but the movie, which is set in apartheid-era South Africa, strives to be as politically agitated and impassioned.
Noyce is the sort of director who gets better with age. Even if his taste for action hasn't changed, it's certainly matured. The brute force of, say, "Patriot Games" was deepened with conscience and soul in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and "The Quiet American," his two previous films. In "Catch a Fire" Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.
Written by Shawn Slovo, the film tells the real-life story of political prisoner-turned-freedom fighter Patrick Chamusso, whom Derek Luke plays with smiley contentment interrupted by fits of despair. Patrick is probably a decent man, but when the film calls for righteous fury, Luke brings nothing but decency to the part.
Patrick is an oil refinery foreman who had avoided getting mixed up in any anti-apartheid business. Life is fine for him, his wife, Precious (Bonnie Mbuli), and their children. One night, driving home from a soccer match with the youth team he coaches, Patrick witnesses the refinery on fire. The police nab, torture, and jail Patrick and two of his black co-workers. And when Patrick won't cop to the charge, the police do the same to Precious until he confesses, even though he'd taken the day off from work for the match and to visit the mother of another of his children, whom his quick-tempered wife knows nothing about.
The lead investigator on the case, Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), thinks the confession is bogus and lets Patrick go. But the damage has been done. Shedding his apolitical nature, Patrick joins the African National Congress and heads to Angola for an education in victimless terrorism. He emerges with a plot to blow up the same refinery, which was a symbol of the nation's economic inequality.
Despite being set in the early 1980s, "Catch a Fire" functions best as a movie of our moment, when torture, indefinite detention, and questions of legal representation are in the news. Patrick is abused into becoming the terrorist he tried not to be. But Noyce and Slovo, whose father was the rare white member of the then-outlawed ANC, have a tough time gaining any dramatic traction from the parallels the movie implies. They even attempt to make someone complex of Robbins's glowering apartheid colonel, a man whose senses of patriotism and morality are at odds. But Vos's intent is confused. He lets Patrick go, yet insists his two daughters learn to shoot guns. (The training comes in handy.) "We're the underdog," he says. "We're the ones under attack."
The attack is set to a beat. "Catch a Fire" relies on symbolic musical eruptions rather than direct political urgency to carry it along. There's enough marching through the streets with flags waving and fists in the air to qualify a number of scenes as production numbers. Obviously, protest songs imbued the anti-apartheid movement, and you get the sense that the movie wanted to approximate the "musical stampedes" Marley once sang about. It's a noble try, but because those moments seem detached from the story's driving action, they also feel glib.
The movie's final shot undermines its toughness, too. Luke and the real Chamusso, who now runs an orphanage for kids with AIDS and HIV, dribble a soccer ball together. A nice moment for the scrapbook, perhaps, but it makes " Catch a Fire" feel like the mawkish tribute it worked hard not to be.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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