Quietly superb, emotionally stirring Eastwood movie

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2010)

A quietly superb film from Clint Eastwood, Invictus is another genre defying entry from a director with a long track record of them, that is not quite a sports movie but neither is it a biography of its world famous central character Nelson Mandela.
Anthony Peckham's clever script is nominally about Mandela's support - over fierce objections from his own party - for the hated national Springbok rugby team & how their improbable victory at the 1995 world cup finally overcame the bitter divisions of the apartheid era to unite the country. But what we have here is equally a subtle study in Mandela's brilliant grasp of strategy & leadership (he has his aides test him on the names of the Springboks so that when he meets them for the first time he can greet them like old friends) & his shrewd recognition that unless the black majority can demonstrate forgiveness to a sceptical & suspicious white minority - one that controls the banks, the police & the army - the country is doomed. Key to this is attracting much needed foreign investment (the eyes of the world are watching anxiously) & when Mandela learns that a billion people will be watching the rugby cup final he instantly grasps the PR significance of this for his country & for the world if the Springboks can win the cup.
Freeman is impressively understated here not only capturing Mandela's physical mannerisms (the hunched shoulders from spending decades in a tiny cell) but also leaving it up to the audience to decide whether his public concern for those he must work with - expressed through a succession of carefully calibrated speeches - is genuine or simply the work of a brilliant tactician shrewdly exploiting his media image as a saint. There are hints, here & there, of Mandela's estrangement from his own family & these touchingly remind us that behind the public image is a man who paid a very high personal price for his actions. A convincingly beefed up Matt Damon is also excellent as the Springbok Captain Francois Piennar. Francois doesn't pretend to understand the politics of the situation but he can intuit immediately that the situation he's in concerns something far greater than just a sports victory as he tries to convince his sceptical team mates. As per Freeman it's delightfully understated acting & it's a very good demonstration of Damon's versatility.
There's also a satisfying parallel storyline to Mandela's efforts which centres on his bodyguards. These guys are perpetually fearful of an assassination attempt & it's a task not made any easier by Mandela's habit of wanting to leave his entourage to go on impromptu walkabouts in the crowds. His security detail are a mixed team of black & whites who on first meeting view each other with barely disguised hostility. Indeed, on their initial encounter the first question out of the mouth of the black guard is 'Have you come to arrest me?'! In the hands of a lesser director & writer this would have descended into cringe-making backslapping & we're-all-brothers-under-the-skin proclamations, but Eastwood is too good a director to fall for this & the slow recognition that both teams are on the same side simply develops organically, without ever seeming forced.
The climactic rugby scenes are satisfyingly crunchy, clearly filmed (there's a refreshing absence of Paul Greengrass-style shaky-cam shots) & the gist of the game is communicated clearly even if the specifics remain obscure. There's also a jaw-dropping scene involving a 747 Jumbo that is one of those outrageous moments so WTF? that it could only have come from real life (& indeed did actually happen). The stadium sequences depicting thousands of cheering supporters are pretty staggering & demonstrate just how far crowd software has come since Gladiator's famous arena shot. As impressive as that was I always felt there was something not quite right about it but the CG crowds packing Ellis stadium here are completely convincing, indeed overwhelming at times. Invictus is also, I think, superbly edited & it seemed to go by remarkably quickly for a two hour plus movie.
As for Eastwood, he's a directorial marvel avoiding so many of the pitfalls inherent in this kind of material. There's no sense of self- importance about Invictus. The film is epic & yet intimate, if that makes any sense. It wears its themes very lightly, as if aware that the material is so strong it doesn't need amping up. Eastwood's understated, unemphatic approach amusingly drives the lazy, the impatient & the immature viewer up the wall but I found his approach so stirring it had me welling up with tears on more than one occasion. Whether it's Francois telling his stunned family he's been invited to tea with Mandela, an absolutely exquisitely judged sequence on the infamous penal colony of Robben Island, where Francois imagines Mandela reciting Invictus in his tiny cell, a blink & you'll miss it moment as a tough white bodyguard hurriedly puts his sunglasses on to hide the fact that he's tearing up at the Springboks having reached the final, or gently underscoring the reconciliation theme by crosscutting the climactic match with a black kid slowly edging closer to a group of cops listening to the match on their car radio, Eastwood makes this kind of ambitious filmmaking, so littered with obvious booby traps just look so bloody easy. Granted Invictus is unabashedly feel good but there's nothing wrong with that provided it's as well done as it is here. It's a film that leaves you buzzing & although corny to say it - yep - uplifted as well. Recommended, but do try & catch it on the biggest screen you can.