Four Days in September.

Four Days in September, the fact-based thriller about some idealistic Brazilian students who kidnapped the American ambassador in 1969, creates suspense the hard way: by making us care about the characters whose lives are in danger. When the leader of the kidnappers, a hate-corroded ideologue, puts a gun to Ambassador Elbrick's head, director Bruno Barreto doesn't have to amplify the cocking of the pistol so that it sounds like the gate of hell being unlocked. We catch our breaths because we genuinely fear for this gentlemanly official with his air of sober decency, wry self-mockery, and need to explain himself lucidly to his abductors whenever they interrogate him. Alan Arkin, who plays Elbrick, has shucked off all the tricks of his youth - the staccato speech pockmarked by sudden shouts, the demented widening of the eyes - and now seems to be able to think his character into existence. Like Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool, Arkin is an actor of such technical security that he no longer lunges for his audience but waits for it to focus on him.

But it's not only Elbrick we care about. Most of the terrorists are middle-class students, but Barreto and his scriptwriter, Leopoldo Serran, never let us dismiss their actions as the struttings of radical chic. These youths are truly ashamed that their once democratic country is now ruled by a military junta. And their high spirits and intellectual curiosity don't allow them to embrace the conformity and self-immolation of the true believer, though they sincerely try to. Forced to take guerrilla aliases, they tend to revert to their own names. Encouraged to think of each other as mere components of the coming revolution, they can't stop themselves from flirting, gossiping, arguing, and asking their hostage personal, friendly questions. Fernando, an intellectual who can't shoot straight, hears the ransom statement he penned read on TV and starts to mouth the words along with the announcer, so proud is he of his literary style. Next to emotionally messy, humane kids, the cell leader seems small and desiccated, a squat thug, and it's not surprising that the young people are soon responding more to the ambassador's dignity than to their cell leader's dedication, though they are still willing to kill Elbrick if their demands aren't met.

With its car chases, shootings, impersonations, and hairbreadth escapes, Four Days in September is melodramatic yet never a melodrama. Melodrama demands simplification of morality and it is this simplification that the movie repeatedly avoids. Ideals and reality collide repeatedly through the movie. The guerrillas rob a bank and pause to lecture their captive audience of tellers and customers on the righteousness of this "expropriation." (Oh, those revolutionary euphemisms!) But a terrified girl in the crowd can only put her head on her mother's shoulder and weep, even though the revolutionaries are supposedly robbing on her behalf. Fernando, taking a cab, hears the driver - another one of the common people the kidnappers are trying to serve - praise the subversives he's been hearing about on the radio. "They've got guts! They're my heroes!" (Fernando delighted.) "Them and the American astronauts!" (Fernando flustered.) The enthusiasms of machismo are seldom politically correct. And who is it that provides the police with the clue that leads them to the kidnappers' hideaway? A baker. The people united can never be defeated, especially when they've got a hot tip for the cops.

Yet, misguided as these youngsters are, their kidnapping does result in the freeing of many dissidents from the hands of torturers. And some of the apprehended kidnappers will themselves be liberated from torture by a future kidnapping (not shown on screen) perpetrated by German terrorists. Can it be that when a government puts itself above the law, it makes this sort of ongoing exchange of prisoners inevitable? (With innocent bystanders, sooner or later, caught in the crossfire.)

But can a movie be too humane, too complex in its sympathies? Four Days in September has drawn criticism by portraying a security-force torturer not as a monster but as a man capable of love (for his wife), concern for civil peace, and self-doubt (confessing to his wife that torture perpetrates the image of the state-as-monster against which even more idealists will rebel). Since torture is indeed monstrous, isn't any characterization of the torturer, any presentation of his psychology or domestic situation, beside the point? Shouldn't the torturer have been portrayed with chilling neutrality as a mere component of the authoritarian state?

Whatever Barreto's answer would be, here is mine: Torture is a crime against humanity, and the torturer himself is indivisible from that sinned-against humanity. The scene with the torturer's wife isn't there to present some specious relativism (torturers are just folks like anybody else) but to show how the poison from the husband's job pollutes the private life that he has striven to keep separate from his work. When the wife learns of her loved one's job, something inside her collapses; we see in her face that she'll never look at her spouse again without imagining the cries of his victims. Four Days in September is not an exercise in liberal relativism but a work of radical humanity.

Let me add that it contains the best action sequences since the Harrison Ford thrillers, Patriot Games and A Clear and Present Danger. But whereas Ford has to jump off motor boats and helicopters to get our pulses pounding, Barreto gets the same effect by planting Fernando in an apartment with his sweetheart after the kidnapping has been resolved. She goes in the next room to get something but Fernando continues talking to her. She replies. Fernando continues chatting. Then she doesn't reply. And doesn't reply. Fernando stiffens. And then he knows...they've come for him and they've already got her.

I've often wondered when the old Hitchcockian elements of silence, nonresponse, and unseen awfulness would make their reappearance in a cinema dominated by the noise of machinery and explosions. Well, here they are in a compact and neatly wrapped package that never stops ticking.