Bland to the bone

Invictus
DIRECTED BY: Clint
Eastwood
STARRING: Morgan
Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge
CERT: PG

Of all the stories a man could tell about the life of Nelson Mandela, Clint Eastwood has opted for a nice, uplifting one. Or a bland, toothless one, if we’re to be more honest.
It’s the story of the World Cup in South Africa. No, not the real World Cup, taking place there this summer, the Rugby World Cup of 1995. That one ended racial hatred in one fell swoop and brought the rainbow nation together to live happily ever after in blissful peace and harmony. You know, that one.
It opens with Mandela’s release from prison (exactly 20 years ago today, if you’re reading this on Thursday), where he’d spent 27 years in that famous little cell. On the road, he passes between two sports pitches. On one, a bunch of poor black kids kick around a soccer ball. Across the street and behind the fence, a team of privileged white boys play rugby and their manager is none too impressed by the historic nature of the day.
Mandela (Freeman) thinks to himself, “How shall my countrymen be united in blissful peace and harmony forever?”
Four years down the road, he’s elected as South Africa’s first black president. Bad day for the old white guard, who rightly fear there may be some penance coming down the line for all those years of apartheid. But Mandela has other plans.
The World Cup is coming up and he believes it’s the perfect opportunity to unite the nation. The only snag is that the country’s rugby team has always been famously white and despised by the majority black population as the epitome of South Africa’s infamous moral malady.
Mandela’s mission is to make the Springboks everybody’s team and to that end he employs team captain, Francois Pienaar (Damon), to evangelise to the masses, bringing the good news of the oval ball to all men.
Of course, this essentially means winning the tournament. No small feat, especially when faced with a mountain called the All Blacks. Though rugby fans will never have seen a New Zealand team quite this puny and there is no mention of the old alleged food poisoning incident prior to the big showdown – still a sore point with the Kiwis. But then, this is a nice movie about heroes and harmony, not politically-motivated puking.
In any case, you probably know how it all turned out and so the climax will be no surprise, though Eastwood does tick all the right boxes to ensure a suitably dramatic and emotional finale.
His film could have offered so much more, even if he was restricted in adapting John Carlin’s narrowly-focused book and by the simple fact that he’s addressing a man and a subject that is still very much alive. 
So as it is, Invictus is not even a story about Mandela the man and his great struggle – including the one at the heart of his own family. Which is unfortunate for the excellent Morgan Freeman, who was born to play the role of the legendary statesman, but ends up portraying a mere shadow of the public face of Mandela – in a film which doesn’t even get close to digging deeper into the world of a man who has lived an extraordinary life, in extraordinary times, in a country, which for many years, was a byword for all that was wrong with the world.
Freeman does give it his best shot, giving his underwritten character as much of his usual gravitas as he can muster. Opposite him, Damon doesn’t have to stretch himself much and his character’s life is as shallow as Mandela’s – and with whom there is really no hint of a friendship, an emotional shallowness that afflicts all of the relationships in the film.
But Damon does acquit himself reasonably well on the rugby field and the match scenes are mostly well done. Though it could have done with fewer delirious crowd shots and it would have helped to have a commentator for the games though not if his dialogue was as dodgy as everybody else’s.
A missed opportunity all round. It’s no surprise that Invictus will be largely absent on Oscar night, except for its actor nominations – which you have to say are obligatory rather than deserved.