My father spent the first 31 years of his life in Communist Poland, leaving him with a distrust of major media that left him inclined to espouse this adage: “The only news you can be certain is accurate and untouched is sports.” He knew the universal appeal of sports as a diversion from the bleakness of life in even the most oppressed societies, and passed that lesson on to me from an early age.
**SPOILERS COMING***
Similar principles drove Nelson Mandela to use sports as a means of forgiveness and reconciliation when he made the dramatic climb from being a prisoner in the apartheid era of South Africa to becoming the nation’s first black president. And it is that powerful process that drives the new film “Invictus,” starring Morgan Freeman as the legendary leader and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the leader of South Africa’s official rugby team, the Springboks, who led the team to victory in the 1995 World Cup Final in a season that provided the first major step towards national unity after decades of division.
As directed by Clint Eastwood, who at 79 is directing films with more ambition and scope than men a half-century younger than himself, “Invictus” expertly blends the personal stories of these two men with the epic scope of a nation’s rebirth and the visceral excitement of a sport’s world championship game. The result is a rousing spectacle that also offers substantive material to think about long after the movie is over and a message that should resonate with our nation’s own ongoing struggles with race.
The film jumps right into the day of Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 after 27 years in captivity. Despite some overly lax pacing in the first half-hour, it provides a quick series of insights into Mandela’s character and methods of leadership – particularly his desire to lead by personal example even in entrusting his life to a half-white, half-black security force in which the whites are former “special forces” policemen who had formerly been seen as the enemy of the nation’s black population.
Mandela’s first foray into sports comes when he receives word that a meeting of black activists has voted to put the all-white Springbok team out of existence. Racing to the meeting, Mandela defies the wishes of the crowd before him, risking the ire of staff members who don’t understand the primacy he’s placing on what they see as just a game. But Mandela knows that if he can show respect for the white population that is scared of revenge from the new black leadership on this level, it will pay off with major dividends as he tackles his society’s more far-reaching and intractable problems.
Calling Pienaar into his office, Mandela encourages him to take the team further than it seems capable of as a matter of national pride. And as the team comes together, improving with its new sense of purpose as well as opening its membership to its first black player, the black population slowly but surely joins in and starts to follow the Springboks with a newfound excitement that Eastwood showcases with an ever more propulsive narrative drive. Yet it never loses touch with intimately powerful moments such as a team field trip to Mandela’s prison island, where Pienaar movingly enters the cell where Mandela lost nearly three decades of his life and the prison yard where this man of intellect was forced to bust rocks on a daily basis.
“Invictus” is the perfect thinking-person’s film for the holiday season, due to its mix of solid writing by Anthony Peckham, who adapted the book “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin, sterling performances and a message that is handled with restraint rather than heavy-handedness. Following Eastwood’s wildly entertaining 2007 film “Gran Torino” in its unflinching depiction of racial divisions and the effort to overcome them, it also offers an invaluable and utterly vibrant picture of humanity coming together that couldn’t be more timely.
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