Good and effective, great performances, but generally run-of-the-mill

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2009)

For the past decade or so, Clint Eastwood has had one of the most consistently high-quality outputs out of any director working today – and aside from Robert Altman and maybe one or two more earlier in the decade, he is also the oldest one of the bunch. It was an absolute treat to see a director reach the twilight of his career and bloom with the vitality and energy of a young director just getting his big break. Eastwood's films this past decade have been big, potent epics of emotion, from the Shakespearian characters in Mystic River to the down-and-dirty determinists in Million Dollar Baby to the subtle honor of the stars of Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood was always so careful in selecting his powerful, dramatic subjects over the past few years – which is why the vanilla-coated glossiness of Invictus seems completely out of place in his oeuvre.
The strongest aspect of this film is without a doubt the cast. To Eastwood's credit, subject matter like this – big, epic historical biopics – do usually tend to ham it up when it comes to acting and very often enter the level of theatrics and over-performing. Luckily, Eastwood is at least too smart to fall into that trap, and both lead actors in the film – Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, who actually plays more of a supporting character, but no matter – deliver quite subtle and yet totally effective performances, despite the fact that they are playing larger-than-life characters with real-world counterparts. This renders the performances less bombastic and showy than what has come to be expected from these types of roles – I especially expected Freeman to turn this into one of those "roles of a lifetime" things – but they are still emotionally powerful and admirably subtle turns from two of our greatest actors, especially Damon who is most effective and one of the most underrated performers working today.
As to the film itself, it's not that it's bad in any way; it's a really good and effective drama that depicts an important event in world history and covers a lot of emotional and political ground in a very simple and concise premise. There are some truly powerful scenes – such as the first time Freeman's Nelson Mandela steps onto the Rugby field and is met with a pretty noticeably equal mix of cheers and boos from the crowd. My one real problem with the film is that it takes a very important and complicated political atmosphere – post-Apartheid South Africa and the reconciliation efforts on the part of Nelson Mandela to bring the blacks and the whites together and to unify his country – and just blatantly over-simplifies it and sugarcoats it. And I think that the screenplay is to blame: its lack of harmony and emotional balance is really noticeable. I felt that scenes depicting the racial tension suffered from the "Crash" effect: put the problems so dead center – and solved them so easily and without too much suffering – that they never really got the heart of it. I also felt that something was a little off in the rugby scenes: Eastwood has shown a newfound energy and vitality in his recent films, but the scenes depicting the rugby games in the film just felt stiff, and lacked the immediacy of better-edited sequences in the likes of Friday Night Lights. To sum it up, I think that when a science fiction film manages to deal far more seriously and deeply with the same themes as an important historical drama such as this one, something is definitely lacking.