Invictus

Invictus – I’m going to give it a personal grade of A, an overall grade of B+. It is not a towering cinematic achievement. But it is good story telling. And if you are in a group that has a vested interest, I think, like me, you’ll like it a lot. And here’s how I’d break those groups out:

Morgan Freeman fans: [Hi, Glo!] It’s his best performance in years. He really challenged himself by taking on a distinctive public figure like Mandela. The accent isn’t exactly right (Matt Damon does a much better job with the Boer accent), but he gets Mandela’s cadence and tone very, very well. And the body language is just spot on. Plus you also get the magnetism that you get even just watching Mandela on TV. There’s a good mix of “great man” and “just a man”. I’d compare it to a Frank Capra movie. With Freeman playing the Jimmy Stewart role.

Sports fans: This is a really good sports movies. And even if you don’t understand the finer points of rugby (how many Americans do?), you’ll get what a physical and dynamic sport this is. It could even tempt a few American football fans into checking this craziness out. Rugby is like football if you grafted on soccer, volleyball and king of the mountain, and then played it backwards and off your medication. The only place that the movie slightly falls down is that because they didn’t want the other players to completely tower over Matt Damon, the other members of the team aren’t quite as big as they should be, so you don’t quite get the overall impact of what professional rugby should look like. But it’s pretty darned close.

And you were there: This is where I fall in. After reading Playing the Enemy, I had to wonder what it was like to actually be there at that World Cup match. And you really get a taste of the scope of what happened that day when the Springboks played the All Blacks. Clint Eastwood really went for the power of the historical moment. Once again, I knew how it all turned out, but I was still riveted. And it’s a good piece of end-of-the-year optimism that shows a moment where people behaved better than they thought possible.

On the downside, there are some things that would be misleading if you didn’t know the actual history. Damon’s character appears to be a mix of Francois Pienaar and Morne Du Plessis. The way the Springboks learned Nkosi Sikelele is completely inaccurate. The flyover is an even better story than what you get in the movie. And you might get the impression that Mandela only came up with his plan after he came to office, when there is good evidence that he had the seeds of the idea quite a bit before he came to power. But there are sacrifices that need to be made in history in order to make a coherent movie. And I think the adaptation is close enough that you get some taste of the incredible real-life drama that this was. And I hope some people will become curious enough to go find out what really happened.