“Clint Eastwood has a thing for choosing stories that are brimming with epic grandness, but rather than facing them straight, he looks over their shoulder and into the eyes of something else that hovers about. Films like  Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima weren’t so much about war as they were about everything that happened after war, or maybe during war, but not quite in the battlefront. His new Invictus wades similar waters as it opens up on the recently released, recently elected president Nelson Mandela, but the film will be about the national Rugby team winning the World Cup.
Oh, it is a superb performance by Morgan Freeman, who channels Mandela’s ease through shivering bright eyes and sad smiles, and a fine one by Matt Damon (the Rugby team captain), who mildly walks in the shadow of Mr. President. The story is soberly based off the real-life1995 Rugby World Cup held in South Africa, and through it we get a glimpse of Mandela, his humane philosophy and the beginning of a better era.
But for all these wonderfully good things we’re left with a purely structured film. Mandela wants Damon’s François Pienaar to win the World Cup for him as a means to unite the country, fresh off from the Apartheid. Sure thing, boss. The film enters a straight two-hour run towards absolute victory without offering any distraction of any kind but for a few isolated scenes depicting Mandela handling speeches each more brilliant than the one before.
After that, we get locker scenes with the Rugby team getting psyched before a game and pissed after it, couch scenes where families nonchalantly watch Mandela on TV, and a half-baked subplot involving Mandela’s mix-raced bodyguard unit learning to cooperate with each other. Overall, the film can be interesting in the form of a documentary —it is real enough and sober enough to play that card —and in the lights of showing one of humanity’s greatest characters ever, but take Mandela’s presence away and you get your regular C+ feel-good flick.