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Directed by Clint Eastwood
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Invictus The
twentieth Century;, as awful as it was, was blessed by the emergence of three
saints: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela – somehow the
worst eras in world life find unselfish men – saints – who help
us to redeem ourselves and serve as beacons for the world. “Invictus” is the story of one of the men – a
man who spent 27 years chopping rocks at Robben
Prison just outside Cape Town, and then emerged to take over as president of
South Africa. Clint
Eastwood has given us a portrait of that man, with an American actor who was
designed by by whatever Gods there are, I think, to
play Mandela – Morgan Freeman – who looks as though he’s
waited more than 70 years to fulfill that role. It
is the first year of Mandela’s presidency, and the Rugby World Cup is
set for South Africa, but the Springboks, the name for the team, is
definitely second rate and is likely to be swept away in the quarter-final
round.. The captain of the team
is a an Afrikkaner played by Matt Damon –
Francois Pienaar – as are all but one of the
men; hated by the blacks for their cruel role in apartheid. But
Mandela tells his black people to keep the name of Springboks; to change it
now would offend without finding any spot for forgiveness, which was
Mandela’s chosen role to play as President. The Springboks practice and somehow
survive the early rounds of play, until the cup final against the great New
Zealand team, the so-called ‘all-blacks.’ But
“Invictus” is more about Mandela than
about Matt Damon, who becomes more an instrument of Mandela’s style of
governance than just a hero on the field. And I think because of the script by
Anthony Peckham, which manages to show so much of
Mandela, from his estrangement from his own children to the way in which he
models a new lifestyle for South Africa, including the persuasion of Damon to
take the team to Robben Island prison and see the
very cell in which their president spent 27 years, has an enormous effect on
the team and of course on us in the audience. Rarely have I cried at something as
unsentimental as this film, and yet knowing it was based on at least a
portion of reality I surrendered to it once again. “Invictus”
surmounts every possible cliche without distorting
the facts, and emerges as a brilliant picture. (And by the way, the Victorian poem
“Invictus,” which gives the film
it’s name – you know it: it ends with the stanza: “It matters not how strait the
gate,/ how charged with punishments the scroll,/ I
am the master of my fate:/ I am the captain of my soul.”) Well,
it turns out that what Mandela actually gave Francois Pienaar
was in fact Theodore Roosevelt’s address in France, in 1910, called “The Man in
the Arena,” which is also beautiful, and which you can find for
yourself on Wikipedia. It’s
worth it. |