Invictus (***½)

Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Scott Eastwood

Seen: December 12^th 2009

***½ Out of ****

“I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.”

So ring the last two lines of a short poem by English poet William Ernest Henley, published in 1888. The title of this poem is Invictus, Latin for “unconquered”, and I believe that only an elite few out of history can lay claim to those words over their own lives (more should have been able to…). Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in jail, in a small cell with only a blanket for comfort, and he was in control of his fate and his soul when he came out of there. Most would be expected to start on the revenge path, especially if they were afforded the power Mandela was given by his nation, but Mandela took the road less travelled, he did not just become another Africa statistic, he broke the mould. Africa has a tendency to turn great liberators into great dictators, but Mandela liberated and the kept on liberating, even if it meant freeing those who oppressed him for all those years.

Invictus tells the story of Mandela’s rising interest in rugby, and the power the game had in rescuing a nation, from when he was released and had to convince his own party members to not abolish the Green-and-Gold and the Springbok emblem, right to the Springboks winning the Rugby World Cup in 1995. Along the way some smaller story elements are touched on, most prominently dealing with black and white in South Africa now having to work and live together as a nation after the end of apartheid: in particular Mandela’s black body guards and the new white Special Forces agents thrown into the mix together. Mandela realised taking rugby from the white population would have alienated them even further, driving an already scared part of the nation deeper into obscurity. Mandela reached out to everyone, and created something great out of it all.

Morgan Freeman has always been the only person to play the role of Mandela, and he inhabits him almost to perfection. I say almost since there are times when his accent sounded suspiciously American instead of truly Mandela-like, but only at times. Matt Damon is pitch perfect as Francois Pienaar, the then captain of the Springboks, even speaking a few lines of Afrikaans (no doubt phonetically coached, but well done none the less). The rest of the cast is purely there for supporting roles, as Invictus finds at its core the relationship formed between Mandela and Pienaar before the World Cup. Not that it’s a friendship, but the two men came to understand each other, and Pienaar to greatly admire Mandela (which he still does).

Clint Eastwood has done something fantastic, perfectly capturing the spirit of the time. I remember that I was in the 9^th grade when the World Cup was hosted in my country, and the excitement was palpable every day. I felt like it was 1995 again, remembering how we as a family squeezed in in front of the TV to watch the final. The movie does not for one second wallow in the turmoil of post-apartheid emotions, rather choosing to focus on the positive, the things that contributed towards the greatness that we as a nation can aspire to and have experienced so far. Eastwood has come to South Africa as a foreigner and managed to not alienate the populace with an ignorant view of the country. Well done.