“Invictus” tells an incredible and entirely true story, that of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. In that year Nelson Mandela (played in the movie by Morgan Freeman) used a white-dominated sport that had been a prominent symbol of apartheid to reconcile white and black South Africans. With the help of the Springbok’s captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), he launched a PR campaign that brought the leftist agitators of the anti-apartheid African National Congress into the same sports tent as right-wing Afrikaners, most of whom were rugby fanatics. By championing the Springboks, Mandela convinced whites that he respected their culture, and in the process he helped unify a nation on the verge of race-based civil war.
It is essentially a story about the charm, magnanimity and political genius
of Nelson Mandela. So even if some of the historical details were allowed to slip by the wayside (and they were), the only chance this movie stood of being a success was in hitting Mandela’s chord in perfect harmony. If director Clint Eastwood couldn’t do that, he should have scrapped the project altogether.
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But he couldn’t hit the chord, and then he didn’t scrap the project. As a result he has on his hands a movie that is neither good nor bad, one whose story is too beautiful to be dismissed, but whose execution is too botched to win any of those Oscars it was so clearly pining after. (Deservingly, at least.) This is a movie made by a man who doesn’t seem to know the pace of rugby or the pulse of South Africa, and that’s a big problem when you make a movie about rugby in South Africa.
I can’t tell you how painful it is for me to say this, but Morgan Freeman, who was perhaps the only American actor with a decent shot at playing Mandela, is just not convincing. He’s not awful, but he clearly falls short. In trying to affect the mannerisms and accent of his subject, he loses the big picture. Mandela, as John Carlin makes clear in his book “Playing the Enemy,” on which the movie is based, used every exchange of greetings and words with others to communicate the esteem in which he held them. He was a “professional seducer,” but one who seduced people into exposing their better natures and discarding their tribal divisions. Freeman, in this movie at least, is not that positive seducer. Granted, I’ve never met Mandela, but reflecting on the books I’ve read and videos I’ve seen of him, Freeman does not capture his spirit in a recognizable way. In this we can at least partly forgive Freeman: it might be the world’s toughest role to play.
Who doesn’t deserve forgiveness is Anthony Peckham, the man who wrote the terrible screenplay (and by association Eastwood, for using the terrible screenplay). Peckham’s script sometimes puts lines in Mandela’s mouth that are wildly out of character for this Nobel laureate, such as when the elderly Mandela tells a much younger woman on the dance floor that when he sees her he envies his polygamist father. It’s a charming, if slightly strange compliment, and maybe Mandela said something like that at some point in his life, but in the context we find it in the movie it is utterly ridiculous. It feels nothing like the real Mandela, but rather a figment of Peckham’s imagination. At other times his script is tepid and predictable, without any pleasantly surprising lines, gestures or expressions. The dialogue at these points becomes a mere vehicle for the development of plot. At one point a burly Afrikaner on the rugby team refuses to learn the new South African national anthem, part of which is in the African language of Xhosa. “I can’t even read it, or pronounce the words,” he deadpans, as if he had a deficient vocabulary in his own language as well.
Carlin’s book furnished plenty of material for a great sports movie, and sometimes Eastwood and Peckham hit on this. One scene from the book that they successfully translate sees the entire Springbok team (almost all of whom were Afrikaners, the perpetrators of apartheid) take a ferry out to Robben Island, where Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders were imprisoned for decades off the coast of Cape Town. As Pienaar walks around Mandela’s former cell, clearly moved by the man’s ability to persevere through the adversity of twenty-seven years of unjust imprisonment, we get suggestions of Mandela’s generous political imagination spreading to other people. There’s no trite dialogue, just reflection. More often than not, though, Eastwood needlessly imposes elements that he thinks will move the story along, like Mandela fainting from exhaustion on the steps of his presidential residence. All the while important details of the story go unstated and undemonstrated. Many of the gestures that people make in the movie will be totally insignificant unless one has read Carlin’s book. This gives the film’s plot a lop-sided, lumpy and very unpleasant texture.
As if an after-thought, Eastwood makes a big to-do about the championship rugby game between the Springboks and the New Zealand All-Blacks to end his movie. Here more than anywhere else he misses the spirit of his subjects. The most painful instance is when he shows the All-Blacks perform their infamous pre-game Maori war dance, the haka, which he cuts together in a way that manages to turn the most terrifying spectacle in the entire sporting world into a laughable little diversion.
He also insists on far too many computer-animated panning shots around the stadium, making an event that was very much real feel like a CGI fantasy land, or a video game. And then there's his excessive use of slow motion. Seeing the colliding players' spit spew at a snail's pace across the screen as they grunt in tones below the register, one can't be blamed for thinking that there is a bit of parody in such a ridiculous scene. In the end his take on the game feels like one long commercial for ESPN HD. It has very little of the gravitas of nation-building.
Rugby is not a game for surgeons. Steady hands are rarely required. Film-making is a bit different, and Eastwood would have profited from more attention to the proper details of the history and the true spirit of his subjects. The material was all there, he just couldn’t exactly figure out what to do with it.
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