Moral Icon

W. Kornblum and L. Quart on Invictus

MORGAN FREEMAN was asked many years ago by Nelson Mandela to create a film based on No Easy Walk To Freedom, his 1994 autobiography. It never got made, but Freeman got his chance with Invictus, a big-budget Hollywood film, where he indeed plays one who is the “master of his fate.” Director Clint Eastwood uses sports, in this case rugby, to dramatize Mandela’s courageous political leadership. Rugby was the sport of the white Afrikaner minority (soccer was the game of black South Africans), and their nearly all-white team the “Springboks” was a symbol of apartheid. Based on the John Carlin book, Playing the Enemy, the film captures the story of the 1995 Rugby World Cup held in South Africa not long after Mandela became president.

In the film’s opening sequence, Mandela has just been released from the prison on Robyn Island, and through a series of powerful black-and-white scenes, Freeman convincingly captures Mandela assuming the presidency amid African euphoria and white fear. But Mandela was still aware of the many difficulties that he now faced. Upon seeing a headline of an Afrikaner newspaper that read: “He Can Win An Election, But Can He Govern?”, he admitted, ”It’s a legitimate question.”

As Mandela took office, most of the white staff members tendered their resignations and were preparing to leave. But Mandela surprised everyone with his grace, generosity, and profound understanding of the racial climate of his fractured society. He rejected the advice of his party and advisers and provided the rugby team with his wholehearted commitment in its quest to win the World Cup.

It was a shrewd political move; Mandela knew that he needed white support in order to run the country and economy effectively and achieve some semblance of cultural reconciliation. Unlike some of his compatriots, Mandela had transcended the desire to punish his former jailers. But despite the complicated nature of his ascension, the film eschews genuine political analysis and only mentions in passing that the new regime faces severe problems, which included one of the highest violent crime rates in the world, unemployment, poverty, a “brain drain,” an HIV/AIDS pandemic, and a struggle to achieve monetary and fiscal discipline.

What the film does focus on is the rugby tournament. As is Eastwood’s wont, he never grants much psychological nuance or inner life to his major characters, and the minor characters—the political advisers, bodyguards, housekeepers–are equally one-dimensional figures. Invictus implies that the noble Mandela like more ordinary men is beset with personal difficulties–his separation and divorce from controversial politician, Winnie Mandela, was a particularly painful episode in his life–but it’s the iconic figure, not the complex human one, that Eastwood and Freeman have decided to project.

The film’s only significant white character is the Springbok captain, a sympathetic, opaque Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) who is more a medium to demonstrate the powerful moral effect of Mandela on others than a developed character. In fact, the whole film is a medium for this message. It has little normal conversation and is built around the very direct, inspirational, and morally uplifting quality of Mandela’s way of speaking.

Invictus is geared to manipulate and move. The underdog Springbok’s World Cup victory against New Zealand’s vaunted All Blacks is supposed to be viewed as a parallel for Mandela’s improbable triumph in unifying South Africa. The lengthy final scene of the rugby players sweating, bleeding, and banging into each other is extremely well-handled, but the swelling soundtrack and the syrupy shots of interracial bonding over the Springbok victory are saccharine, even embarrassing. Just as the film manufactures from Mandela’s story a breathless tale of a politically transcendent leader who has suddenly made all of South Africa’s turmoil and poverty disappear, it draws similarly specious conclusions about what was a genuinely great sports victory.

Nelson Mandela deserves a better film than Invictus–a film that honors the man not through hagiography but through an honest portrayal of the difficulties he was forced to overcome. But let’s hope this is only the beginning of films that depict Africa’s political leaders with the same respect accorded to George Washington or Simon Bolivar. After a diet of films about Idi Amin, Rwanda, and other African horrors, this film is certainly welcome even if a work of art needs much more than being on the side of the angels.

William Kornblum, a member of the Dissent Editorial Board, is a professor in the Doctoral Sociology Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Leonard Quart is professor emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, Contributing Editor of Cineaste, and co-author American Film and Society Since 1945(Praeger).