STANDER IS FUN mostly for watching Thomas Jane climb the rock wall of movie stardom. He flexes muscle and conscience playing Andre Stander, the youngest captain in the Johannesburg police force, who loyally participated in quelling the 1976 Soweto uprising. Police riot squads had killed several students among the many protestors they clubbed and gassed; the politically ambivalent Stander, feeling guilt-ridden about this display of oppressive brutality, rebelled perversely. In an unexpected turnabout, he became a near-legendary bank robber. On trial three years later, Stander noted the irony of his career path and commented, "I'm charged for robbing banks but [as a cop] I have killed unarmed people."
Taking anti-heroic opposition to the apartheid system, Stander's self-serving style of civil disobedience illustrates the way some white South Africans passively disdained their social status. A movie that goes along with Stander's "rebellion" might appear to sanction his weak-principled haughtiness. The same covert egotism rules from Hollywood to Johannesburg. Yet seeing Thomas Jane maneuver around this problem helps expose the inherently racist narcissism that's at the root of such mainstream movie fiction as The Bourne Supremacy and Collateral, movies in which actors celebrate killers without conscience.
In his previous films (Deep Blue Sea, The Sweetest Thing, Under Suspicion, The Punisher), Jane sometimes seemed to be a parody of a movie star, putting his idealized tall, blond physicality out there in ways that were sometimes goonishly, sincere. But it was in his little-seen early films like The Velocity of Gary and The Last Time I Committed Suicide that this actor (the best-kept secret of 90s indies) first distinguished himself. Jane showed an interesting regard for his external advantagesnot hiding his amiable looks with funny make-up, but daring to take on roles as a reprobate and louse that might hinder his prospects for Hollywood celebrity.
A show-off part in a somewhat conventional thriller like Stander might seem to offer a sure thing, but this character's complexityhe is alternately heartthrob, bum, neuroticgalvanizes Jane's idiosyncratic instincts. This star role serves the enigmatic social conviction that always seemed to be behind Jane's choices. Jane uses those fine lips, bright eyes and lean, agile musculature for a wild, expressive purpose: he makes a goofily sincere reproach to apartheid.
Because Stander himself wasn't a freedom fighter, the movie doesn't pretend to argue politics; Stander the South African scion displays an indignant law-breaking reflex. He is implicitly and vigorously contemptuous of that economic system. The way Stander turns against it (charming bank tellers, then shocking them; constantly outwitting his police cohorts) suggests a deep, personal understanding of his part in that culture. (The way Jonathan Demme transformed John Fogerty's classic rock ballad "Fortunate Son" into Wyclef Jean's reggae cover for The Manchurian Candidate is a similar private gesture of cultural transgression.) Stander realizes what whiteness stands for in apartheid South Africa and scoffs at the prerogatives it holds while performing his daylight robberies dressed as a Muslim, a Hasid or, most audaciously, as himselfa fortunate son who revolts.
Jane invests Stander with an American actor's wiliness that, coupled with his convincing Afrikaans accent, amounts to a fascinating disclosure: that the cinematic portrayal of bad-boy individualism betrays both an unconscious political construct and an actor's sense of personal liberationall of it aimed at seducing the audience. Jane's Stander, first seen speeding down a road, racing the clock to his second marriage to the voluptuous Bekka (Deborah Kara Unger), immediately recalls Peter O'Toole's T.E. Lawrence motoring in suspicious overdrive. However, Jane flashes the youthful recklessness American pop culture teaches us to admire. But in this foreign, politically shady context, our pleasure is set on edge. It becomes clear that movies regularly present examples of minority-rule heroism without regarding either the ideology behind it or the emotional consequences. From there Stander takes on double meaning: It is an action-biography meant to be enjoyed as a spree that also forces us to ponder its protagonist'sand its makers'ethics.
When it was fashionable for progressive film folk to dramatize the apartheid horror during the 1980s, they used noble white protagonists (Kevin Kline in Cry Freedom, Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando in A Dry White Season and in the best of the bunch, Barbara Hershey in Chris Menges' A World Apart). These were prefab reformists rather than Stander and his erotically comfortable ilk. As a Canadian and South African co-production, Stander bridges the social imperatives of two continents, and Jane supplies a Hollywood imprimaturlending the serious struggle to the triviality of millennial film culture. It claims the license to be an impudent history of one man's reaction to injustice.
Seen from the other side of the millennium, and of Afrikaner complacency, apartheid gets queered. More than a simple Robin Hood-style obstacle, it is the source of Stander's intemperate behavior. "Why do the wrong ones keep dying?" he asks his father (Marius Weyers as retired Gen. Stander). This scene of disillusionment and unhelpful parental advice is as apt an explanation of domestic heritage as that father-son indoctrination scene in American History X. But director Bronwen Hughes barely explores the Oedipal tension. With her co-screenwriter Bima Stagg, Hughes misses the compounded generational conflict and cultural rebellion that made the real-life father and son story of Catch Me If You Can such an amazing social and psychological artifact. Hughes fails to achieve a new political humanism like Demme's Manchurian Candidate or Catch Me If You Can, because she can't reasonably validate Stander's private insurrection as a social revolution. So Hughes sacrifices Jane's game characterizationalong with the swift, sharp personality sketches that David Patrick O'Hara and Dexter Fletcher make as the cellmates Stander helps break out of jail to become part of his gang. Her quest for too much breath-baiting suspense and gangster cool almost stretches into the folk-hero format as John Boorman did in The General. But sometimes her quasi-visionary effort (she pulls off the 70s look with the panache of Spike Jonze's Sabotage) is out of sync with Jane's impassioned reconsideration of film heroics.
Jane's rogue figure is unique in the era when The Rock and Vin Diesel have taken over the heroic pedestal previously occupied by Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. It is compelling to see Jane, a real actor, essay an able-bodied characterization that isn't simply physicaland not a Walter Mitty wish-fulfillment cartoon like Tobey Maguire's Spiderman or the other current big-screen comic book heroes. (Even Jane's The Punisher was peculiarly in touch with the real world. As orphan, widower and grieving parent, he suffered a palpable anguish.) Playing Stander as both a zealous crook and a penitent who walks into a black shantytown saloon, begging to be whipped by the father of a boy he killed can be interpreted as a kind of fateful self-destructiveness. Clearly, Jane conceived the role as a metaphor for the Afrikaners' intransigencean example of the kind of moral commitment few actors exhibit these days. That commitment can also be seen in O'Hara's Allan Heyl, a burly Burt Reynolds' type and Fletcher's skittish Lee McCall Hughes. These lonely men think of themselves as renegades rather than political prisoners because, like Stander, their thinking has already been stunted. (Heyl tells a intimate story about his own futile rage against apartheid.) Still, they cut loose from the social customs they weren't fully aware were holding them back.
It is a measure of how dishonest and shallow contemporary action-movie heroes have become that it takes a conflicted film like Stander to show that a man's brokenhearted dissent can coincide with righteous politics. The teenager in me smiled at seeing Spider-Man's exhausted body hoisted by the family of man (Sam Raimi turned mosh-pit body surfing into a social sacrament), but it's not a fantasy you can live on. Thomas Jane offers a more splendid ideal in Stander when his alienated golden boy assesses the banality of evil and decides: "Either become them or live at odds with everything around you." o
