Invictuas

Dir. Clint Eastwood; Starring: Matt Damon; Morgan Freeman;
Clint Eastwood’s Invictus tells you many things about Nelson Mandela. That the revered ex-South African leader is a bully, a crook, an unrepentant terrorist. Only joking. It tells you that he’s a great statesman, a generous-hearted visionary, healer of a wounded nation. There may be some churls and BNP followers who’ll screw up theirfaces at this latter interpretation. It’s likely the rest of you will raise your eyebrows: why is Eastwood, whose films have always been keener on the drama of revenge than on reconciliation, making this now?
Invictus (its title comes from a Victorian poem by WE Henley that helped to sustain Mandela during his 27 years in prison) is that rare beast: an American movie about rugby. It uses the 1995World Cup final – in which the Springboks, widely assumed to stand a snowball’s chance in hell against the All Blacks and their unstoppable winger Jonah Lomu, created one of the greatest upsets in recent sporting history – as an opportunity to do two things: to present an Obama-era parable about the power of hope and collective endeavour; to make Matt Damon, in the role of South African captainFrançois Pienaar, assume the feyest hairstyle of his career.
It begins with a tale of two sports pitches. On one side of a narrow road lies a rugged patch of scrubland where stick-thin black kids holler as they run around playing football. On the other side, and on green and tended grass overseen by a fierce taskmaster of a schoolteacher, protein-rich white boys play rugger. Africans andAfrikaners: they’re two tribes divided over an oval ball.
It’s a class thing, too: white folks, someone says later, think of soccer as “a gentleman’s game played by hooligans”; black people, in turn, think of rugby as “a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen”.
For Mandela, this faultline offers an opportunity to exploit the symbolism and feel-good potential that have always made sport so appealing topolitical leaders and to use them to further his “Rainbow Nation” credo.
It’s a risky strategy. Some aides urge him to focus on housing, jobs, crime. He knows that the national team’s green-and-gold shirts connote apartheid in the eyes of the majority of the population. He himself admits that when he was a prisoner on Robben Island, “we used to cheer for anyone but the ’Boks”. Is this opportunism?A purely political calculation? “It is a human calculation,” he tells his chief aide Brenda Mazibuko (Adjoa Andoh).
He meets Pienaar, a terse man not given to small talk and discusses leadership strategy with him. Soon he’s writing out a copy of “Invictus” for the Springbok captain. Its lines declare: “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”
This is rousing, imperial stuffthat pumps Pienaar, whose team has recently endured humiliating international defeats, to new levels of resolve. Why, he even tries to persuade his players to sing along to Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, the new national anthem that some of the old lags in his team dismiss as a terrorist song.
Who could object to this stirring narrative? A better question might be: do you really thrill to the idea ofgoing to the cinema to hear over two hours of noble platitudes and political speechifying?
“The past is the past. We look to the future.” “Forgiveness starts here. Forgiveness liberates the soul.” “This country is hungry for greatness.” Yes, yes. Important sentiments, one and all. They’re also ones you’ve heard many times before. Only the most prurient person’s going to be annoyed that this isn’t awarts-and-all revisionist biography of Mandela, but surely the film could hazard an argument or work a new angle?
You definitely want it to be less naïve in its belief that sport – let alone sporting triumph – can unite or heal a nation. That hasn’t even been the case in South Africa, where to this day rugby is seen as a more elitist and “white” game than football.
To posit that notion in...