Everyone knew that one day Morgan Freeman would end up playing Nelson Mandela on the big screen, but as the years passed, an aging Freeman meant that Mandela’s latter years would be the focus. But don’t be fooled, Invictus isn’t a Mandela biography. South Africa’s most famous revolutionary prisoner cum Springbok-loving President is presented here as the driving force behind a more communal national or more euphemistically ‘rainbow’ acceptance of the national rugby union team. The political tinderbox prison years are dealt with in flashbacks alone and his newly minted freedom and subsequent election to the highest position in the country is represented in brief introductory scenes that look hastily edited. After that it’s all football, all the time. Despite being universally loathed by the black population because the white Afrikaners love them, Mandela figured the national rugby union team – the Springboks –represented some sort of crude reconciliation talisman, so he promptly invites the underperforming team’s captain Francois Pianeer (a suitably barrel-chested and slippery-accented Matt Damon) to a private defrag. After which Pianeer realises he should steer his team to an unlikely World Cup victory later that year.
It’s that simple, see. Pianeer’s teammates resent being the unwilling poster boys of Mandela’s fresh start, but they eventually acquiesce. Sure, the still seething racial divisions of the post-apartheid era have been smoothed over – but c’mon, this is a story of sport triumphing over racial hatred. Credit to director Clint Eastwood; the ruggers scenes are tightly shot, amply reflecting the beauty and brutality of union with little concession to the international audience who would barely understand the game. But Eastwood has constructed a film where technical expertise is immaterial because Invictus is a simple story of acceptance prevailing over division; a theme the aging director is devoting an increasing amount of time to in the final act of his brilliant career.
