Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/20/09
We spend a lot of time thinking
about how our nation and world's problems are too big to solve, the opposing
parties too ideologically dug in, the issues involved too divisive.
As such, it's helpful from time to time to think back to the 80's, when
Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize, Nelson Mandela was in his third decade
in prison, Little Steven Van Zant and friends declared that they weren't
gonna play Sun City, and there was no nation on Earth that seemed less
likely to ever know peace than South Africa, where decades of Apartheid
held the black majority under the thumb of a ruling white minority.
But yet, Apartheid did end, Mandela was not only freed, but became his
nation's President, and somehow whites and blacks managed to live in peace
about 100 years faster than they did when slavery ended here in the United
States. How did it happen? Well, for one thing, Mandela may
just be the world's greatest living statesman. And Invictus,
Clint Eastwood's new film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament held
in South Africa, tells us a great story about how he used the event to
help heal the nation's divisions, and how the team, led by Captain Francois
Pienaar, came through for their country when it needed them most.
The movie probably bites off more than it can thoroughly chew, and sometimes
it simmers when I'd have preferred it to boil. But led by the rock-solid
performances of Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Pienaar, this
is a first-rate inspirational sports movie that just might make you believe
people can solve their problems after all... with the help of a well-placed
field goal or two.
Three years after his release
from prison, Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) is the President of South
Africa, but the struggle to heal the scars of Apartheid is just beginning.
Unemployment is massive, foreign investment is minimal, and seething frustration
on both sides of the racial divide threatens to erupt into violence.
1995 will bring the Rugby World Cup to his country, the first major International
event they've hosted, and the President is determined to latch onto the
opportunity to rally the country around the team. The problem is,
the Springboks Rugby team, beloved by the white minority, is despised by
the blacks who view its' name and green and gold colors as symbols of their
oppression. Mandela himself had been proud to cheer for their opponents
from his tiny cell on Robben Island. The team has only one black
player, Chester Williams (Mcniel Hendriks), and has not been playing well,
and the new government wants to rename the team and change the colors.
The divisions are clearer nowhere than among Mandela's own security staff,
where Security Chief Jason Tshabalala (Tony Kgorge) despises the Springboks
and all they stand for, while his white co-workers, led by Etienne Feyder
(Julian Lewis Jones) are lifelong fans excited by the front-row seat their
assignment gives them to the big event. Mandela summons the Springboks
Captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to the Presidential Palace and makes
the importance he places on the event clear. The team begins to travel
around the country and hold rugby clinics in shanty towns and takes an
emotional tour of Robben Island, but Pienaar finds no interest among his
fellow players in learning the words to the new National Anthem.
As Mandela pushes himself to the brink of exhaustion to build his new nation,
a funny thing happens: the Springboks start to win. Could a
World Cup run be the divided nation's first chance to stand together as
one?
It's odd to see Clint Eastwood
select material this upbeat, and it's hard to think of a director who'd
have approached Invictus with as even a keel as he does. It's
not that he doesn't try to go for the inspirational jugular (there are
plenty of musical montages and slow-motion triumphs to go around, although
they're not the movie's strength), it's just that there's a propriety to
the way the Eastwood version of these devices play that assures no one
will think Invictus was directed by John Lee Hancock. This
is good and bad, as the movie is mercifully free of wince-inducing
moments playing to the back row (not a single Springbok fits a Sports Movie
Type). But while there's an uncommon honesty to some of the big moments
at the end, they also fail to pluck the heartstrings as skillfully as,
for instance, Gavin O'Connor's similarly dignified and restrained Miracle
did back in 2004. I think the deficiency is in focus, as Invictus
is really two movies in one that occasionally intersect: the story
of Mandela's early days in power and the story of the Springbok World Cup
run. Neither gets the room to really stretch out that might have
made them soar, but they're two pretty fine stories, and the movie gets
a lot of mileage out of them.
There, Eastwood's seriousness
of purpose pays dividends, because we get a sense that we're watching real
people's real reactions in the sweep of history. It helps that his
two stars are playing down their star power. Freeman's Mandela impersonation
is as skillful as one would have expected (he's always been the former
President's choice to play himself), and while the material doesn't allow
a lot of chances to look beneath his iconic exterior, it is very interesting
to watch him calculate his every move and work to present the welcoming,
all-inclusive face his country couldn't have moved forward without.
While I don't know anything about the real Pienaar, Damon does a great
job shedding his Matt Damonness to successfully adopt the South African
accent and a quiet, bulldog athlete demeanor that's the total opposite
of his trademark calculating professionalism. Since they're both
good guys coming at things from the right point of view, it's primarily
in the guards' room that we watch the actual struggle for South Africa's
soul play out, and Kgorge and Jones are quietly excellent in their roles.
Most of the other performances are low-key and lived-in, contributing to
the overall feeling of authenticity. Even the crowd at the climactic
game seems more like a real crowd than you usually get in a movie.
At its' best, Invictus
juggles the two sides of its' tale skillfully, as in the powerful sequence
where the players visit Robbin Island, and writer Anthony Peckham does
a fairly good job making Mandela our “in” to learn about both rugby and
the World Cup. Even so, I didn't understand the closing seconds of
the Big Game, and the movie probably has a little more rugby footage than
it needs to. Certainly that time could have been used to better flesh
out some of the under-developed Mandela subplots, including hospitalization
for exhaustion that lasts roughly one second, and a promising thread involving
his inability to relate to his daughter doesn't go anywhere. We only
really see the great man's public face, which is fine for the story's purposes,
except that the movie tries just enough to go deeper to make you notice
that it doesn't.
One thing I really liked
about Invictus is that it's the rare movie to acknowledge the important
role sports and leisure play in a society. People keep telling Mandela
to forget about rugby and focus on the important problems facing his country,
but he's studied human nature enough to know that the way to a person's
heart is through the things they love, and while each of us loves certain
people in our lives, all of us can love a sports team, and that's the kind
of glue that can bind a society together. Invictus could have
been better than it is, but it gets the job done in telling a stone-cold
awesome tale of political triumph from our recent past, and these days,
we can use all of those we can get. |
