Ray Pride

"What will your children say about you?"

Philip Noyce's "Catch a Fire," written by Shawn Slovo ("A World Apart"), inspired by men her father met as part of the African National Congress' battle against South Africa's apartheid government, is taut, painfully resonant, and ultimately deeply moving. Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) is a worker falsely accused of being a terrorist who is observed and released by policeman Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), but who responds to his treatment by leaving his wife and child and joining the ANC to change their world.

Noyce does something intriguing, combining the skills he learned while making studio movies ("A Clear and Present Danger," 1994) with the social and political concerns shown in the movies he made with the light-savvy, frame-selfish cinematographer Chris Doyle on "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and "The Quiet American" (both 2002). Every possible pitfall you'd expect in the narrative is eluded, the acting is forceful yet often fiercely understated, and the visual style works with intensely powerful geometry in almost every frame. The conclusion is simple, bold and true: it's the year's softest ton of bricks.

Noyce and I had a couple of conversations, most recently over the phone as he sat in a hotel room looking out over the Boston Commons. His next project is an adaptation of Philip Roth's great novel, "American Pastoral," which includes the Weather Underground in its concerns, so I wondered if he thought politically charged movies work best when they're set in the past. "I don't think politically themed movies have to be set in the past," he says in his Australian drawl, "but it certainly helps people to step off their own soapboxes, to remove themselves from their own immediate passions and maybe to feel less confronted by issues when they're veiled in a story told in the past. It allows us to maybe have more of an intellectual and ultimately perhaps even more passionate reflection or illumination on the present than the sometimes-divisive retelling of a story or telling of a story that confronts the issues that are right outside our doorstep, where we feel we have to take sides and therefore we only submit our present beliefs instead of opening ourselves up to the possibility of another opinion. But I think that's the beauty of all history, isn't it? It illuminates the present and the future for us."

President Bush has begun speaking of the Iraq conflict as compared to Vietnam. "Right," Noyce says. "Well, I hope he understands the history of Vietnam"--he laughs grimly--"as well as the families of the 56,000 names that line the Vietnam memorial in Washington do."

Along with the line about the legacy we leave our children, there's a striking statement by Vos, "Our job is to find the terrorists, not to imprison an innocent man." "I wonder as I sit here in Boston, overlooking the commons and looking out over Charlestown, and Bunker Hill and to all of the sights of the struggle for American independence, I wonder what the British called the American insurgents, or guerillas, or combatants, or soldiers, or whatever they were referred to at the time. It would have been a variation on `terrorist,' I'm sure. Whether those tactics that we now call terrorism may have in fact been perfected during that conflict right here within half of a mile of where I'm sitting."

The look of "Catch a Fire" is tense, yet beautifully offhanded. "You know what? On this film, I learned to trust in the collaborative process in so many ways. I was lucky enough to have, as my camera operator, a gentleman, Alistair Rae, a British camera operator who was also the Steadicam operator, who was just a master of the spontaneous composition. At first, I gave him some storyboards and I also kept looking through the camera and trying to be directorial. But then I realized that when I didn't do that, what he gave me so much exceeded the limitations of my own vision that it was better to shut up! And even better sometime just to let the scene play and let him find the angle and the moments himself through his eye responding to the energy of the performance, the architecture of the room and so on. And by the end of the movie, I was directing him by not saying a word. For me, at age 56, having made movies since I was 18, and having always wanted to intervene, that was a real breakthrough. In one way, I started it when I first worked with Chris Doyle. Chris is so protective of that frame and his ability to compose that he actually lets off steam when a Steadicam operator comes in. Because he doesn't operate the Steadicam. And you feel his agitation, his nervousness about someone else being the visual architect! But I realized with Chris also it was better to let him show me ways to see the story rather than me imposing on him. But I finally let go on this film."

"Catch a Fire" opens Friday.

(2006-10-24)

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