There is a scene in STANDER that stands out among many such memorable ones. In it, a teller is introduced to Andre Stander (Tom Jane) the police officer who is in charge of finding the man who robbed the bank window she was minding. The thing is, Stander is also the man who made away with the money barely an hour earlier, and the look on the tellers face gives away that she knows that. When Stander asks her to describe the robber, she looks incredulous and then, timidly, owns as how he bears a striking resemblance to the officer standing in front of her. General laughter all around, forcing the eyewitness, who knows better, to join in, albeit nervously.
Forgive me trotting out the cliché about truth being stranger than fiction, but as an example of the based-on-a-true-story genre, Bronwen Hughes STANDER is distinguished for not only offering up a gem of an example, but also for being a trenchant view of what happens to people living under a system that is inherently evil.
The system is apartheid, the year in 1976 and Stander is the youngest captain in the South African police force. He’s just re-married the love of his life (Deborah Unger) and if he bent a few traffic rules to get himself to the wedding on time, who can blame him. That he would bend them, and that director and co-writer Bronwen Hughes would include that moment so near the beginning of the film is not an accident.
Faced with riot duty in one of the townships, or rather, faced with one human face that he shoots down, something in Stander snaps. Is it a sudden revelation about the evils of apartheid, or is it a sudden eruption of feelings subsumed to the received order? Either way, it’s not important. The scales have fallen from Standers eyes and, given his penchant for rule-bending, somethings big is bound to happen. An off-hand remark about the government being so busy keeping the black man down, that a white man can get away with anything plants a seed. A few days later, walking by a bank, and seemingly as a whim, Stander walks in and robs it. After getting away cleanly, he does it again, dozens of times, sometimes giving the money to a surprised black man on his getaway route, but often buying expensive presents for is wife and for himself. He’s caught, of course, but at his trial, his reaction to being convicted is telling of the turmoil Stander is dealing with. I’m sentenced for robbery, he says, but not for the murder that I’ve committed.
That alone would have made for an interesting film, but that’s just the beginning of the story. Stander’s bank-robbing career continues with the help of a gang he puts together in prison and he pulls dozens more heists with an insouciant impunity. Far from becoming notorious, he becomes a sort of folk hero. When a bank manager realizes he’s been robbed by the Stander gang, he positively swells with pride. And why not, they do things like rob a bank next to a police station where the national task force chasing him is headquartered?
It is not taking to great a leap to say that Stander, with his breakdown when he is forced to face in very human terms the true meaning of apartheid, is emblematic of the white population as a whole, forced to collude in an inherently criminal society that institutionalizes the dehumanization of a portion of its citizenry. How else but to react but by flouting the law? There is an inevitability to it, as well. Hughes lays a careful foundation before the crime spree begins of an impulsive, passionate man, full of contradictions, as hopelessly besotted with his wife as he is hopelessly guilt-ridden with what he did in the riot. Hughes presents both aspects of Stander’s psyche by stripping him down emotionally and sometimes physically, presenting the audience raw emotions that are like a palpable shock wave rolling off the screen. Jane, in what by rights ought to be his star-making role, delivers a visceral performance, creating layers of emotion that plague and propel while never playing any of them false.
Hughes has successfully produced with a deft, sometimes ironic hand a paradoxical amalgam that is like nothing so much as different, competing facets of a single source. A light-hearted action flick, a finely drawn character study, and a damning social commentary, STANDER, is ultimately as complex, as elusive, and as seductive as its subject.
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