Invictus (2009) Feels a Little Scattered

I did. Honestly. Plus, I feel like I owe my small community of readers a positive review, after I've taken a bit of a beating for savaging The Blind Side (another film which I really wanted to like, and actually did, for the most part). But Invictus was missing something. It's taken me a week or so, since I actually watched it, to try and figure out what that was.

I think, ultimately, it's a problem of focus. This has all the elements for an inspiring film. Set in early post-apartheid South Africa, Invictus interconnects two stories: new president Nelson Mandela's attempts to bring healing and reconciliation to an impoverished country torn asunder by decades of racist strife, and the successful drive of the South African rugby union team, the Springboks, to victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. These two stories are actually connected, claims producer and director Clint Eastwood (not to mention John Carlin, whose book Playing the Enemy is the basis for this movie).

In the first story, actually told from the viewpoint of his bodyguards as much as Mandela himself, the new black president struggles to win over a bureaucracy and an economic elite still populated chiefly by whites. The frequent scenes with his black and white bodyguards, who grumble and chafe constantly in the privacy of their office, seem like they're put in for comedic effect, but they're also immensely symbolic. Mandela plays a quiet but decisive and insightful father figure determined to bring to the nation the peace and tranquility he clearly has been unable to bring to his own family. (He doesn't get along well with his daughter, but then, he was in prison for virtually her whole life, so she may not even regard him as her dad, not really.)

In the second, the Springboks are struggling to achieve a winning record going into the 1995 Rugby World Cup. They do so and ultimately win the championship, with the help of their sole black player, Chester Williams. Chester's inclusion is problematic. It's historically accurate -- he was there, after all. But the film doesn't explain why Chester is on a team that white South Africa identified as their own beginning in the apartheid period, nor does it play up any sort of enmity that might exist between Chester and his white teammates. (This is in opposition to Williams's autobiography, which claims that members of the 1995 national team ostracized him and used "racist names" to refer to him.)

Mandela, according to the film, saw the rugby team as a way to bring South Africa together. Blacks might follow rugby, but many, out of hostility to what the Springboks represented, habitually cheered for whichever team was facing them. Whites followed the Springboks loyally, and would have bitterly represented an attempt to re-name the team the Proteans (as his aide observes, Mandela sacrifices a considerable amount of political capital by blocking that decision and then throwing his weight behind the Springboks team as it already stands). By the end of the film, his bodyguards are playing rugby together, even though the black ones profess not to know the rules. And Mandela inspires the captain of the team (played ably by Matt Damon) too, at least in theory, giving him a poem (the eponymous "Invictus," by William Henley) and arranging a tour of his old jail on Robben Island.

Ultimately, though, it's really not clear what that accomplishes. I don't think the team really needed Mandela's help to succeed (although they certainly seemed to, being extremely weak in the beginning of the movie and very strong at the end, it's not at all clear what they've gained in the meantime or how that relates to Mandela's little poetry reading with Matt Damon). Although Mandela insists otherwise, it's clear he really doesn't care much for rugby personally: it's an act he's putting on based on the political calculation that it will win support among both whites and blacks. Courageous move on his part, but again, all of that suspense is happening off the pitch. Or off the field, as our American cousins might say.

Which is why I was left feeling a little unsatisfied with the several rugby games played during this movie. I know, the movie is about the rugby tournament. And about Mandela's support for the game. But seriously, the team itself are essentially flat characters, aside from the odd touching vignette such as their visit to an impoverished schoolfield where, led by the enthusiastically worshipped Chester Williams, they put the children through their paces in some basic rugby drills.

Not that any of this is bad. It's just that's only half the story, it's not always clear how it relates to the second focus on Mandela, and as a result we never really get a chance to look all that deeply into the lives or the thinking of any of the players, with the partial exception of captain Francois Pienaar (Damon's character).

The relentless shift to the rugby pitch, however, also detracts from the area where the real suspense is going on: the political sphere populated by Mandela, his long-suffering chief aide, and his perennially anxious bodyguards. Here, too, unfortunately, there simply isn't enough time on camera to allow a proper analysis of everything that's going on. Mandela does not really change during the movie, either. He faces no great personal crises. Instead he is steady, assured, and confident throughout the course of the movie. Rugby is a political calculation for him. It's a risky one, which could have backfired, but that's all it is.

Sure, there are moments when he seems to be getting quite captured by it all, even walking out of what looked like an important international economic meeting for an update on the game. But at the end of the day, this is about politics, not about sports, in the mind of Nelson Mandela. His bodyguards are definitely seen getting progressively cozier with one another, probably because they're forced into working together and cooperating rather than because they happened to wander into a few games of pickup rugby on the lawn outside the presidential house.

All of these remarks do seem rather cynical. I do want to point out that the 1995 Rugby cup was a defining moment in the early post-apartheid history of South Africa. Mandela attempted with remarkable success, according to the movie, to turn the Springboks from a symbol of white oppression into a symbol of national unity and strength. But the very greatness of that achievement makes the attempt to retell the story in Invictus seem that much more partial and incomplete. And then, of course, there's real life, which continued on after the cup was awarded in 1995, and turned out not to be so clean and reconciled and race-free as we might have hoped after watching this movie.

Other recent movie reviews by this author:

- The Blind Side (2009)
- Lord of War (2005)