Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela: The Long Walk To Freeman, if you will. It’s certainly a great idea on paper. Although not physically that alike, it’s difficult to think of any other Hollywood actor who could have got away with playing the former President of South Africa. Freeman’s most highly regarded role was as a long term prison convict, so who better to play the man who was incarcerated for 26 years?
Freeman has even met and got on well with Mandela himself and is now a similar age to the great man when he was released almost exactly 20 years ago Freeman’s casting in a Nelson Mandela biopic was surely inevitable.
Well, no. It’s not that Freeman isn’t good – he generally deserves his Oscar nomination for this. The problem is that this isn’t a Nelson Mandela biopic. For whatever reason, that long discussed project has never happened. This is the next best thing. Based on John Carlin’s book, Playing The Enemy, this is the story behind the hitherto largely ignored role of Mandela in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
Only recently elected in South Africa’s first ever multi-racial elections in 1994, Mandela faces a sea of troubles, against which the significance of South Africa’s hosting of the 1995 Rugby World Cup might have seemed minimal. Yet Mandela recognises that the black population’s hostility to the Springboks, the nation’s rugby union team captained by Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), is symptomatic of the nation’s lingering racial divisions. Associating the all white players with the malevolent apartheid regime of old, the black fans tend to boo them. Freeman’s president recognises that by nurturing the team’s success in the cup, the entire population will rally behind them, and to some extent bring the country together.
This may sound naive but it’s a credit to director Clint Eastwood (no stranger to the political jungle as a former mayor himself) that the film manages to be as convincing and genuinely uplifting as it is. The acting is probably the best thing about it. Matt Damon delivers one of his strongest turns as the resolute captain Pienaar, while Freeman is very convincing in a performance largely based around his smiling a lot. As with Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, it’s easy to forget that he isn’t actually Mandela himself and when footage of the great man appears towards the film’s end, it’s momentarily confusing to the audience.
The rugby too is surprisingly stirring, even to viewers who, like me, have no interest in sport. Only the slightly odd insertion of a post-9/11 type scene in which a passenger plane seems briefly on course to be deliberately flown directly into the packed stadium seems unconvincing.
Sport has affected the world of politics many times before. Had George W Bush not been completely hopeless as a baseball team manager in the 1990s, he might never have gone into politics and the world might have been spared his completely hopeless presidency. England’s victory in the 1966 football World Cup is often credited with ensuring the Harold Wilson Government’s re-election shortly afterwards, while the team’s defeat in the 1970 championship also guaranteed the Government’s defeat to Ted Heath in the same year.
As one of the few political legends to have largely lived up to his promise (Obama, please take note), it’s a shame a full-on screen biography of Nelson Mandela has not yet been made. Yet if nothing else, with director Eastwood, Freeman and Mandela himself (in the 1990s) all in their 70s, this is as much a reminder of grey power as it is of black power.
Overall Verdict: It’s not Mandela: The Movie but Invictus is nevertheless an uplifting politics and rugby film that you will still enjoy even if you hate both politics and rugby.
Reviewer: Chris Hallam
