Invictus (Saturday, December 12, 2009) (192)

I don't get this movie at all. I understand that Clint Eastwood, who has become the wise old man of American cinema in recently years (especially with the passing of Robert Altman a few years ago), would want to make a movie about Nelson Mandela. I also understand that he would want Morgan Freeman to play Mandela as he looks an incredible amount like him. What I don't get, though, is why the hell he would waste his Mandela picture on a freaking rugby movie.

Americans don't care about rugby - we barely know about the sport. There are three baseball movies that Americans like: Field of Dreams, The Natural and Major League (I love Eight Men Out, Bang the Drum Slowly and For Love of the Game, but I don't think anyone has seen them). There are two football movies that Americans like: Rudy and maybe Remember the Titans. There is one basketball movie that Americans like: Hoosiers. There are no movies that Americans know and like - sorry Slap Shot. Americans don't give a crap about soccer - and no, Bend it Like Beckham is not a soccer movie and nobody has seen it anyhow. Americans couldn't tell a rugby scrum from try from a test if they were chasing them down a pitch.

At any rate, this movie begins with Nelson Mandela being released from jail where he had been for 27 years. Not-so-subtly Eastwood shows a car taking Mandela down a road, where on one side is a posh private school for white Afrikaners who are practicing rugby on their lush green grass and on the other side of the road, you see a bunch of black children in a burnt-out muddy field playing soccer. The Afrikaner rugby coach says to his boys something like, 'Remember this day, lads- this is the day our country went to the dogs.' Oh! Aha!
Thanks, Clint!

OK - so the next scene is some four years later after Mandela has been elected president and is now taking office. There are hundreds of problems he has to deal with, from massive unemployment to bringing business investment back to his country after worldwide boycotts of South African products and industry to dealing with the aftermath of the Apartheid system. In addition to these issues, Mandela sees rugby as a key to bringing white and black South Africans together. The only problem is that the whites love rugby and the blacks prefer soccer - or if they know anything about rugby, they root against the national team, the Springboks, who were a symbol of the hateful system of the past.

The Springboks are not a very strong team anyhow. Their captain, Francois Pienaar, a nice middle-aged Afrikaner (played by Matt Damon), says the right things to the press about how they have to work harder, but is rather out of options on how to make his team good enough to do well in the Rugby World Cup of 2005, a year away. So Mandela becomes friends with Pienaar hoping he can inspire the man or his team to win. Mandela sees winning the World Cup as a way of bridging the white-black divide in the country.

Despite looking just like Mandela, Freeman really struggles with his South African accent. At times it sounds like a typical accent of any African man, and at other times, it gets weak and sounds either English or Southern American. For me, this was distracting and constantly reminded me that it was Freeman and not Mandela. I know this is something I shouldn't say, but I strongly feel that Freeman doesn't do a great job with this role. Damon is fine - though he's given so little to work with that it's hard to tell if his performance is good or bad. Mostly he has a solid Afrikaans accent and looks like he's internally struggling a lot.

The emotion in the film comes from sharp juxtapositions between an old Apartheid-era symbol or saying and the new era of Truth and Reconciliation. At one point, when Mandela goes to a rugby match, he walks out to the field and we see many fans waving the old Apartheid-era flags - the same flag under which he had done his prison time. Another time we see the Pienaar family (Francois, his wife and parents) sitting around their living room talking about how much they don't like Mandela and his new government, while their black maid stands in the kitchen making them food, clearly loving the new administration. When the South African team makes it to the final match against New Zealand, Francois gives his parents and wife tickets to the event - and also gives a ticket to the maid. It all so easy and sappy - it makes me want to puke.

What I hated most about the film was the manipulation by Eastwood to make us think one way or another about characters and events. The most glaring of these devises was the choice to have the Springbok team only speak to one another in English - even though they all certainly spoke Afrikaans in the locker room or at home. This makes us feel somewhat warm toward the players. At the same time, Mandela's white security guards speak among themselves in Afrikaans - basically to make us not trust them. This is all ridiculous. Sure, there were lots of white South Africans who spoke English, but most Afrikaners spoke, and continue to speak, Afrikaans. It would be like having one group of Nazis in a movie speak German and another speak English - we would automatically like the English-speaking Nazis more than the German-speaking Nazis - regardless of what they were saying.

On top of all the crap in the film, what is really unforgivable is that the rugby scenes are so badly directed, you have no idea what is going on and what they are doing. I happen to know the general rules of the game, but I can't imagine many American viewers do. Yet, we are only given a very quick lesson about some of the rules (ham-handedly when the team goes to teach some poor black kids how to play) and never really find out how you score points. As a result, the drama is much lowered when we see the players in the final match running around passing the ball seemingly aimlessly.

We don't know what it means that New Zealand has a gigantic player who is hard to tackle; we don't know what happens when you get tackled or why players punt the ball to the other team when they're running; we don't understand what the hell is going on in the scrum or why they're doing that. The worst part is that considering the final match has an overtime period in it, we never know how much time is left in the game - so we see a clock at 9:51 and we don't know if that's 9 seconds left or 9:51 left (are they counting up or down) - or if it is a 20-minute period (which is what I thought). It's a big mess.

Overall the writing of this is clumsy and the direction is pretty awful. There are several times when Eastwood shoots a scene simply from the wrong angle or direction. There are some tear-jerking moments, as one would expect from such a movie. There is rising music and slow motion shots of guys hugging and celebrating. This is pretty banal and dull. I would much rather have seen a biopic about Mandela (with Freeman playing him, perhaps) or a story about his struggles in his first few years in office - or a movie just about the rugby team without the social/political back-story. In the end we get a bunch of half movies. A half sports movie, a half political history, a half Mandela story.

Stars: 1 of 4