Morgan Freeman delivers an astoundingly good performance as Nelson
Mandela in Invictus, from director Clint Eastwood. The film
seems like it’s on its way to greatness in the beginning, with Mandela
dealing with the difficulties of being South Africa’s first black
president.
Unfortunately, the film goes off track; by its underwhelming
sporting-event finale, it has completely lost focus.
The film starts with Mandela’s release from prison; a white rugby
coach observes his motorcade and states that this will be the day that
South Africa goes to the dogs. It’s a mighty opening scene, and
Eastwood follows it with effective moments, including Mandela telling
his new staff that everybody, regardless of their skin color and
political background, will have a chance to work in his administration.
He hires white bodyguards to stand beside his black bodyguards,
declaring, “The Rainbow Nation starts here … reconciliation starts
here. Forgiveness starts here, too.” It’s powerful stuff.
Freeman looks like the man he is playing, and he nails the accent
admirably. He has Mandela’s speaking pattern down, too, and the
resemblance becomes even more amazing when he smiles.
Shortly after taking office, Mandela observes that the national
rugby team, the Springboks, are having a bad season. Many black South
Africans want to have the team dismantled, viewing it as a symbol of
apartheid. Instead, Mandela refuses to break up the team, instead
offering his full support of the team’s goal of winning a World Cup
title.
We then see Mandela summoning the team captain, François
Pienaar (played well by Matt Damon), to his office. This is where the
movie begins to shift focus from the Mandela administration to the
Springboks’ road to glory. Unfortunately, watching a ragtag group of
guys become a formidable sports force—a formula repeated so many
times in cinema—pales in comparison to the prospects of a focused
Mandela biopic.
The rugby matches take more prominence, and the Mandela role is
reduced to a lot of quick, cutesy scenes of him watching games on
television or from the stands. In real life, the team did make a
miracle run with Mandela’s support, and that fact certainly merits a
place in the movie. But I can’t help but wish the rugby element were
more secondary; it would have been nice to see more of the political
unrest that Mandela faced in his first days as a world leader.
One of the problems for American audiences will be getting
emotionally involved in rugby matches, a sport that most of us don’t
fully understand. Eastwood doesn’t take much time to explain the rules
or mechanics of the game, so the shots of men scrumming have little
significance or dramatic tension; it’s just a bunch of guys groaning a
lot and practically standing still while pushing on each other. So, as
a sports movie, it’s actually dull. I’m not even sure a rugby
enthusiast would be impressed.
Eastwood’s filming of the matches, especially the final World Cup
match, is elongated by too many slow-motion shots of the crowd
cheering, as if he’s trying to pad his running time. Yes, he’s trying
to show that both whites and blacks are getting engaged in the
proceedings, but it gets to the point of overkill, and Mandela’s role
continues to become more and more of a background thing.
The film’s most jarringly bad moment occurs when Damon’s character
returns home with tickets for the final match, and he has an extra one
for his family’s black maid. The camera lingers on the woman’s
appreciative smiling face in a manner that I found insulting. A moment
in which an airline pilot shows extraordinary team spirit is handled
almost equally poorly.
This could have been a masterpiece; Mandela’s story is one that
desperately needs to be told. However, Invictus dodges a huge
chunk of that story, and as a result, it becomes just another mediocre
sports movie.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.
What a ridiculous comment about Americans not being able to get emotionally involved with the Rugby matches as they “don’t understand” the rules. I’m Australian and wouldn’t know half the rules of American Football, yet have still able to get well into the sporting scenes in movies like ‘Remember the Titan’s’ and ‘Any Given Sunday’.
If the scenes are poorly shot then that’s another matter, but how in a movie about an International sporting team are the most basic rules going to be explained to an audience? I wouldn’t expect and dare say wouldn’t receive that from a ‘Gridion’ movie and nor should Americans expect it from a Rugby one.
I remember the 95 WC very well. I mostly remember the Wallabies sucking, but I’ll admit I did shed a tear when I saw Mandela walk out in that Springbok jersey…and I remember Jonah, of course.
One thing people outside the cricket and rugby playing nations probably don’t understand is that countries like Australia, NZ or England (to name a few) have a long and intense history of sporting rivalry with South Africa, and several generations of us missed out on that because of the boycotts. SA sports teams were only coming back from that exclusion relatively short time before that 1995 World Cup(5 years), and suddenly we were encountering South Africans who weren’t villains in Mel Gibson movies.
Older people and students of history remembered the strength of the Bok rugby and cricket teams, how uncompromisingly hard (and often how boringly) they played. Think Pittsburg Steelers or Baltimore Ravens types. They’re mostly the same today, and we still enjoy playing them in spite of it.
Whatever else he did, and obviously that was plenty, Mandela saved that for the sporting world, not just South Africans.
Sure, there was a fair bit of simplification in the film, but what else can you do telling complicated real life stories in a 2 hour format?
The acting and story parts of Invictus were terrific, but he badly botched the action sequences.
All he had to do was use footage from the real rugby games, with the odd insert shot of the actors to talk during stoppages in play. It all happens so fast that anything you’d lose from seeing the wrong faces would be more than made up for by the athleticism of the real players, and the real beauty of the game.
A proper scrum at test level is an awesome thing to be beheld (and heard, by which I mean the sound of the hit, not the silly groaning you hear in the film). The real players were twice as big and twice as fast as the men playing their parts. They are expert at packing in ultra tight together and hitting as a unit.
Real lineouts see the jumper getting hurled as high as 12 feet in the air. The outside backs are like wide recievers, cornerbacks and safeties, not the pudgy, slow gentlemen we saw running around in Invictus.
It just can’t be replicated by actors. Matt Damons character Francois Pienaar was more like an NFL linebacker in real life, and just as mean and hungry, as well as being a good leader.
I enjoyed Invictus, but it doesn’t stack up to the real thing.