Invictus

City Paper Grade: B

by Shaun Brady

HAND-TO-HAND: Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) communes with the Springboks' Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) in Clint Eastwood's Invictus. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: B]

The standard narrative regarding Clint Eastwood's career is that its violence-condemning latter half has been one long, triumphant atonement for the violence-glorifying first half. That's an oversimplification, but there is a symmetrical elegance to an arc that begins with the iconic guns-drawn figures of The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry on one end, only to land on the same haggard face dying a martyr on a suburban street in Gran Torino. If that character serves as the final image of Clint on screen — as Eastwood has suggested — then perhaps the only place left to go on that trajectory is to Nelson Mandela, who himself transformed from an icon of resistance to one of reconciliation.

Mandela is here played by Morgan Freeman, whose own career-load of wry-eyed wise men has led him just as intractably to this point, and who throughout suggests the crushing weight of responsibility on the South African president's shoulders behind his strictly enforced unflappability. Invictus, Latin for "unconquered" and taken from the William Ernest Henley poem that Mandela drew inspiration from during his 27-year imprisonment, details the newly inaugurated president finding an unlikely icon of rapprochement in the Springboks, the rugby team that had been jeered by blacks during apartheid as symbols of their white oppressors. Recognizing a sports team as the fastest track to nationalism, Mandela throws his support behind the team leading into the 1995 World Cup.

Eastwood opens by panning from a well-uniformed white team on manicured grass to a shabbily dressed group of black children playing on muddy ground across the street, a concise statement of both the elegant classicism and the predictability-embracing obviousness which he employs for the film's remainder. The unlikely-but-true saga plays out as a standard-issue inspirational sports story, complete with last-minute reverses and underdog victories, which Eastwood undergirds with political weight, suggesting that sometimes people need a few simple clichés in their lives.

—Shaun Brady