Making the world a better place one rugby match at a time

Rating: 9/10 (8 August 2010)

One of the best movies of 2009, "Invictus," written by Anthony Peckham and directed by Clint Eastwood, takes us to a fascinating moment in modern history.
It's the mid-1990s; the racist and repressive system known as Apartheid has recently been overturned in South Africa, and former political prisoner Nelson Mandela has just been elected the nation's first black president. Tensions are running high among the Afrikaners, who fear that the majority blacks will use their new-found power to exact revenge on the white minority. Many of the blacks, on the other hand, find it difficult and distasteful to work in tandem with a people who had degraded, oppressed and even imprisoned them for so long.
Into this quagmire steps Mr. Mandela, a true believer in the power of redemption and reconciliation to change hearts and influence policy, who hits upon a scheme to unite the two factions through their mutual love of rugby, rallying the nation behind the team known as the Springboks, which, for the blacks, once represented all the things they despised about the Apartheid regime. Against massive odds of both history and human nature, this amazing man manages to heal old wounds and forge a new nation based on equality and respect for all.
Derived from the novel "Playing the Enemy" by John Carlin, "Invictus" (the title of a Victorian poem Mandela uses as a guide for his own life) could easily have been just another self-congratulatory exercise in "do-gooder" drama - but its heartfelt honesty, its accomplished direction and its world-class acting make it so much more. Morgan Freeman gives a towering, yet carefully understated, performance as the near-saintly Mandela, a role he was clearly born to play, bringing true conviction to the moral strength, innate compassion and basic decency of a man who suffered so much at the hands of others, yet who refused to allow personal bitterness and a desire for revenge to determine the course his life - or his nation - would take. Instead, Mandela, at great personal risk to his own popularity, used his experience to build bridges and to set his nation on a path towards healing that would allow it to take its rightful place in a modern, more enlightened world where every man is equal and where citizens work together for a common good. Indeed, Mandela is probably the greatest argument for the Great Men Theory of history the past half century has had to offer.
And Matt Damon, boasting a flawless South African accent, has probably never been better than he is here, playing Francois Pienaar, the captain of the Springboks, who is so impressed with Mandela's continued faith in the human race despite all he's been through that he rallies his own team members (most of them white) to join with the president in playing for the glory of the new South Africa - an effort that led them to winning the Rugby World Cup in 1995.
The beauty of "Invictus" is that it doesn't find it necessary to over-dramatize the racial tension or to indulge in ginned-up melodramatics to get its message across. The racism here is often of a more subtle kind - a careless word here, a thoughtless put-down there - and the movie does an expert job conveying that fact.
Recently, I wrote that I couldn't imagine seeing a more inspiring and uplifting film than "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song." Well, now I've just seen one. It's called "Invictus" - and it is not to be missed.