CinePhillyist Reviews ... Invictus

Invictus is best appreciated as a sports movie. Falling in the middle of the jock flick continuum (we position it closer to Hoosiers than Rocky V), the film celebrates the transcendence of teamwork. And it does it well. What it doesn't do is offer as compelling a study of South Africa post-apartheid as the previews seemed to indicate.

The title, Invictus, is taken from a 19th century poem by the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley. While serving his 27-year prison sentence, Nelson Mandela found salvation in Henley's words, and it is this faith that, in the film, Morgan Freeman's character (the first elected president in South African history) passes on to Matt Damon's character—Francois Pienaar, captain of the Springboks, the South African national rugby team.

The movie opens in 1990, as the motorcade taking Mandela from prison passes down a road separating two groups of athletes: young white men playing rugby in sharp uniforms on the well-maintained field of their prep school, and half-naked black students, kicking a soccer ball on an uneven blacktop. With this first scene, director Clint Eastwood offers a sharp, moving look at the injustice of apartheid. And although the sequence grips audience attention, it is one of the very few that attempts to explore the effects of apartheid on the average man's sensibilities.

Invictus quickly moves ahead four years in time to Mandela's first day in office. As he considers how to most effectively unite white and black Afrikaners, his attention is drawn to the challenges facing Pienaar and his rugby team: they are caught in a bad losing streak, and their black countrymen want to shut them down (rugby symbolized white privilege, an institution resented by newly independent black Afrikaners). Instead of supporting the efforts of the people who helped elect him, Mandela defended the team, recognizing its potential to unite the country as it prepared to host the 1995 World Rugby Tournament.

Freeman and Damon give charming, sensitive, and well-studied performances as Mandela and Pienaar. But if Eastwood was looking to illuminate a social injustice through the lens of an engaging sports competition like he so deftly presented in Million Dollar Baby, he fell short.