Invictus
Clint Eastwood (2009)
It has to be accounted a surprise that Invictus has only two Oscar nominations (for the performances of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon). It’s a particular surprise, given the irreproachable subject matter and Clint Eastwood’s enduring popularity with the Academy, that it missed out on a Best Picture nomination in a year when double the usual number was available. The film has performed well enough at the American box office and hasn’t been badly received by US critics but its impact has been underwhelming. Rugby doesn’t mean much to Americans: the NFL-themed The Blind Side has made more money and got a Best Picture nod. It’s probably Invictus’s relative lack of success that is the bad reason for my not disliking it as much as most Eastwood pictures. Apart from the two main actors, it’s a mediocre piece of work but less objectionable than anything I’ve seen by this director since The Bridges of Madison County.
Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela saw the 1995 Rugby Union World Cup in South Africa as an opportunity to realise his dream of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and of the pivotal role the Springboks’ captain Francois Pienaar played in this – but it’s also the blandest of Eastwood’s pictures since Madison County[1]. Anthony Peckham’s screenplay, based on a book by John Carlin, is a feeble, clumsy piece of work but I suspect the main cause of the blandness is (as it was in Madison County) the absence of baddies. Polarising heroes and villains is meat and drink to Clint Eastwood. The villains can be either individuals (like the dastardly opponent who does for the boxing heroine in Million Dollar Baby) or institutions (the Los Angeles Police Department in Changeling). It hardly matters how crudely these forces of darkness may be conceived and presented (and it’s usually very crudely): Eastwood is enfeebled without them. In spite of the political inheritance and racial tensions he’s describing in Invictus, the vilest character he and Peckham can come up with here is the two-faced boor Johan De Villiers, TV pundit and ex-Springbok captain (in the apartheid years – when the team was banned from international rugby). De Villiers is played by Robin Smith virtually as a pantomime baddie.
I’ve read a couple of reviews which see as a main weakness of Invictus the fact that we know the ending – a puzzling objection, given how many much better films than this could be dismissed for the same reason. The problem is not that we know that South Africa won the 1995 World Cup (perhaps a sizeable part of the US audience doesn’t know that anyway) but that there’s so little else going on in the picture. Hardly anything, in fact, except for a perfunctory sub-plot about the black and white security men who work for Mandela and whose mutual animosities are gradually overcome. Apart from meeting a Taiwanese delegation and reference to a couple of trips abroad, Mandela’s job as President seems an improbably cushy one. The script can’t even decide how interested or knowledgeable about the rugby he is or gets to be. Just before the tournament starts, he asks an assistant how important is it that South Africa beat Australia in their opening group match. Told that if they lose the game, the Springboks will then need to beat both New Zealand and England to reach the final, Mandela comes up with the piercing insight, ‘So it is very important that we beat Australia’. When South Africa have won their quarter final match, we see the President marking up the result on his World Cup wall chart. One round and a couple of scenes later, he’s asking his female Chief of Staff (who we’ve been told is sceptical about the whole rugby thing anyway) who is playing in the other semi-final.
The culminating rugby game is a gift to any director. The Springboks’ win over the All Blacks was not only a significant political event but, in sporting terms, a David-against-Goliath victory. (The way the match progressed – with South Africa more than once pegging back New Zealand’s narrow lead before getting their noses in front in the last few minutes of extra time to win 15-12 – is a big help too.) But it says a lot about the film that what the Boks’ win means to Francois Pienaar is more affecting than what it means to Nelson Mandela and the rest of the country. Invictus delivers emotionally as a genre film – the story of a sporting triumph and how it can make very different kinds of people feel great. It doesn’t sufficiently get across how extraordinary this particular triumph was. Except for Pienaar and Chester Williams, the one black player in the team, none of the Springboks emerges as any kind of individual – at least until Joel Stransky kicks the winning drop goal in the final. There’s no sense of relationships within the team or attempt to develop racial sub-plots: nothing on the feelings about, or on the part of, the white man drafted in to replace Chester Williams, who’d suffered a hamstring injury, in the early part of the World Cup; nothing on the irony that the All Blacks’ lethal weapon was a non-white, the Maori Jonah Lomu.
The security men overcome their racially-based suspicions thanks largely to the World Cup. They’re meant to epitomise what happens nationally – although, considering the extraordinary sensitivity of their work, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even so, their suppressed excitement during the final is one of the better bits of Invictus. We can see how nervous they are – we can’t be sure how much the nerves are about a possible attempt on Mandela’s life or about the outcome of the match. Otherwise, Eastwood’s cuts from the rugby field to those watching – in the Ellis Park Stadium crowd, in bars across the country – are dully repetitive. There’s at least one too many stages to the gradually developing relationship between two white policeman engrossed in the match and the black kid hanging about their car (they suspect he’s up to no good before realising he just wants to hear the radio broadcast). I don’t think of Clint Eastwood as a filmmaker inclined to be absorbed by imagery. It’s surprising, as well as a little distracting, that he lingers in the way he does on the physical dynamics of rugby – the thwacking collisions between players, the heaving slow movement of scrums.
The use of the W E Henley poem of the title is not as crass as it might have been. It’s first mentioned by Mandela, when he first invites Pienaar to tea at the presidential residence, as something which inspired him in prison. Pienaar doesn’t ask what poem it was. You can believe that – he’s nervous and quite inhibited on this occasion – even if it also suits Eastwood’s purposes to keep this up his sleeve. Mandela then presents Pienaar with a handwritten copy of the poem shortly before the start of the tournament. By the time Pienaar and his girlfriend are walking round Robben Island a few days later (I’m assuming it’s true that this visit was organised for the Springbok team and their WAGs), he’s memorised it and hears the words in Mandela’s voice. (Pienaar’s imagining Mandela in prison uniform, looking penetratingly at him as the words are spoken, is a bit OTT.) Eastwood soft-pedals on the racial tensions, which are centred almost entirely on the security men. Apart from some of the crowd booing Mandela when he attends a rugby match shortly after becoming President (and a year before the World Cup), there’s barely a whisper of racist abuse. Invictus lacks tension as a result: what made me more uncomfortable was a sense that Eastwood wouldn’t have been so relaxed about race relations if he’d made a film set in America in which they were a central theme. And the film is pretty hopeless when it consciously aims for a lighter tone. Apart from what Morgan Freeman manages to deliver in his portrait of Mandela, the laughs are in pretty short supply. One of the better exchanges is between two of the security men:
‘Black guard: I prefer soccer.
White guard: You know what they say: soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans – rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.
Black guard: Yeah, I heard it before. It wasn’t funny the first time.’
Unfortunately, that punchline could be applied to most of the other bits of ‘humorous’ dialogue in Invictus.
Three or four years ago, Morgan Freeman was cast as Mandela in an adaptation of A Long Walk to Freedom, to be directed by Shekhar Kapur, but the project appears to have been shelved or has at least stalled. Freeman seems to have been the prime mover behind Invictus: he’s one of the executive producers and it seems that he got Eastwood (his favourite director) involved in the project. Morgan Freeman is a master screen actor but there’s something unusually self-conscious about his portrait of Mandela. It’s almost as if Freeman, who has undeniable claims to being the leading black actor of his generation, was determined to get in quick to create a definitive portrait of the greatest black man of his time. The characterisation is meticulously accomplished – in spite of the deficiencies of the writing, Freeman gets Mandela’s mental agility and humour and bloody-mindedness. Yet his gravitas feels relatively conventional. Freeman lacks the almost comical aspect of the real Mandela, which is a singular part of his charisma (and which Harry Enfield’s impression picks up on).
Matt Damon is a famous movie star who continues to be underrated as an actor. He clearly worked hard preparing to play Pienaar: he’s physically completely convincing and, as far as I could tell, his South African accent is very good. He develops the character of Pienaar skilfully – from a fairly unremarkable jock, pampered but dispirited, to someone who finds a new meaning in what he’s doing as a sportsman. The only moments in which I found Damon less than persuasive came when he delivers impassioned, mid-match exhortations to his team. It’s not really the actor’s fault – Anthony Peckham has supplied lines that sound falsely worked out, over-articulate. It’s hard to know, given the inadequacies of the screenplay, whether it’s intentional that Pienaar seems very much apart from his teammates – although this apartness and Damon’s presence serve to sharpen the focus on Pienaar, which is no bad thing dramatically.
Most of the rest of the acting is pretty undistinguished although Tony Kgoroge eventually gives a good performance as Mandela’s head of security. Adjoa Andoh is too theatrically defined as the Chief of Staff and, as usual in an Eastwood film, players in small parts appear to have been encouraged to ‘do a character’ in a way that makes their playing seem awkward and artificial (like Patrick Lyster as Pienaar’s father, although Penny Downie does well as his mother). One good thing is that the black youngsters here are looser and more natural than the white American kids in, say, Mystic River or Changeling. On this occasion, Eastwood has passed the baton for producing a vapid score to his son Kyle (who co-wrote the music with Michael Stevens.)
Richard Brody’s note on Invictus in The New Yorker describes it as taking its place:
‘… in Eastwood’s rigorous series of latter-day reflections on democratic values—here, the republic rests on the shoulders of a virtuous leader who understands the power of political symbolism and senses that a country unites not around its ideas but around its images. As such, it’s also a defense of his own popular artistry—and of the system that sustains it.’
To break the habit of a lifetime and be fair to Clint Eastwood, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s as surprised as I am to be told he’s made a ‘rigorous series of … reflections on democratic values’. (What are the forerunners in the series that Brody has in mind – Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Changeling?) Elsewhere, Brody describes Eastwood’s view of South Africa as ‘sketchy but warmhearted and filled with fine-grained details’. These details were so fine-grained I didn’t notice them. I did notice the opening sequence, which takes place on 11 February 1990 – the day of Mandela’s release from Robben Island. Eastwood shows some white youngsters playing rugby and then – on the other side of the road – some black kids kicking a soccer ball around a patch of waste ground. The ‘coarse-grained’ quality of that crassly obvious juxtaposition is typical of Clint Eastwood. It’s the same heavy-handedness you see in the bit when Francois Pienaar goes home with four tickets for the final – for his mother, his father, his girlfriend … but who, his father asks, is the fourth ticket for? We see the Pienaars’ black maid in the background. If Eastwood ended the scene there (and we next saw the maid in the Ellis Park Stadium crowd) the moment might be effective. No such luck: Francois looks towards the maid, and his father and mother look back at him, and the camera moves in on the maid, and she smiles. And you wait for ever for the director to say ‘Cut!’
7 February 2010
[1] To be precise, it’s the blandest of the post-1995 Eastwood pictures that I’ve seen. These include Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Changeling but that’s less than half the total of eleven. One of the worst things about Clint Eastwood is his prolificacy.