Justin Chadwick (2013)

Jacob Zuma’s announcement of Nelson Mandela’s death a month ago was broadcast at the same time that the British premiere of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom was taking place in London.  This conscientious, unimaginative biopic gets one thing across strongly:  that it’s premature – even though a screen adaptation of Mandela’s autobiography was in the works several years ago[1].   The script by William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Gladiator, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Les Misérables) is virtually shorn of first- person narrative.  Neither Nicholson nor the director Justin Chadwick has any distinctive angle on Mandela to replace it or with which to give the movie a spine.  Mandela follows an even-paced progress of key events in its subject’s life from 1942 to 1994, when he became President.  Although the long walk is, unsurprisingly, a long haul (146 minutes), the storytelling is often sketchy and occasionally unclear.  The impersonality of the film is such that no one other than Idris Elba (Mandela), Naomie Harris (Winnie) and Jamie Bartlett, as a porcine but (relatively) sympathetic prison guard on Robben Island, registers at all.  Bartlett suggests someone capable of human decency but whose ability to show it is hugely constrained by the repugnant political system in which he earns a living.   It’s not surprising that some of the other actors playing Afrikaners overdo snarling callousness, especially when the roles are so slender.  It’s true this overplaying isn’t likely to be a problem for viewers unless they were supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa.  What’s more of a problem is that characters such as Walter Sisulu (Tony Kgoroge) are ciphers.  (It was instructive to see Mandela just a few days after watching The Dam Busters on television.  In that picture, minimal characterisation chimes interestingly with the pilots’ sense of a job to be done.)

Morgan Freeman was involved in the earlier, aborted attempt to bring Long Walk to Freedom to the screen.  If Freeman had starred it would obviously have been necessary to cast a younger actor (or two) to play Mandela before his imprisonment.  Idris Elba, who was forty when the film was shot, ages from twenty-four to seventy-six.  He’s too old at the start and doesn’t look significantly older until his hair goes grey but there’s more amiss with the performance than this.  Mandela was very tall (6’ 4”) and it’s clear from photographs that he was also pretty heavy before his time on Robben Island but Elba’s bulk in the post-1990 part of the film is all wrong.  He has the look of an exceptionally well-preserved prize fighter, or even a sleek businessman.  It was the combination of indomitability and elderly frailty that helped to make Mandela such a compelling presence on the television screen.  Elba’s hewn appearance also embodies the monumentalising tendency of the kind of project that Mandela is.  Obituaries of Mandela stressed both his secular saintliness, especially his capacity for forgiveness, and the natural ease of his communication with people; no one who’s seen the real person can have missed his humorous eccentricity.   Idris Elba doesn’t have this:  when he’s familiar and smiling, it seems like a great man’s largesse.  This may be a weakness in Elba’s acting or, more likely, a reflection of his understandably respectful approach to the role.  He’s better when he conveys Mandela’s stubbornness and clear belief that leadership includes knowing when to tell others what to do.

Idris Elba’s most expressive moment comes when Mandela receives news in prison of his son’s death and struggles to control his emotions.  The viewer sees his shocked distress but also that he’s hiding it from his captors for fear of showing ‘weakness’.  This moment also points up, though, how thinly-textured William Nicholson’s screenplay is.  When Walter Sisulu goes to Mandela’s cell to offer his condolences, Mandela muses on how all the most important people in his personal life are disappearing:  his mother, who’s already died; now his son; Winnie, who’s currently in prison.  Rather than sharing in Mandela’s grief, I found myself thinking that Sisulu and the other ANC members locked up for years on Robben Island must have been experiencing the same kinds of loss.  The film is almost completely lacking in eloquent small details:  it’s water in the desert when a National Party government man notices Mandela has an untied shoelace and bends to tie it as Mandela is about to go in to his first meeting with F W De Klerk.  As Winnie Mandela, Naomie Harris, who had a main role in Justin Chadwick’s previous feature The First Grader (2010), has an appealing vividness in her early scenes but her beautiful, soft features give Harris an innocuous look that I don’t remember the real Winnie ever having.   Harris has other good bits – Winnie’s fury when police break into her bedroom, a dazed embrace of her husband in the first meeting they’ve had in decades in which they’re allowed to touch – but she’s never convincingly authoritative.   The ‘Winnie Mandela Football Club’ aspect is underdeveloped and, by the end, Winnie is reduced to stony-faced solitude, a glass of something alcoholic in her hand (still a sure screen sign of moral decline), as she sits in front of a television showing her ex-husband’s election victory.

Justin Chadwick is very unsure in his use of news film.  It’s tough on Idris Elba that Chadwick chooses to insert footage of the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ campaign with the real man’s face showing on posters and T-shirts.  Elsewhere, Chadwick might have relied more on what was in the archive:  although the Sharpeville massacre is staged well enough, there are several, less specific examples of police and other violence which must have been expensive to mount but which tell you very little.  The sequences describing the 1994 election are feeble.   The score by Alex Heffes is entirely predictable but U2 have done a decent song (‘Ordinary Love’) which is played over the closing credits.  Justin Chadwick and William Nicholson present the climax to the trial of Mandela and the other ANC leaders in 1963-64 as if to suggest that it was only the presiding judge’s desire to deny the defendants martyrdom that caused him to sentence them to life imprisonment rather than death.   I’m not sure whether or not this is accurate[2].  It’s one of the rare dramatically effective moments in the film but Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is mostly too pedestrian to do justice to its subject.  It moves you not because of what it presents, or how it presents it, but only by providing a series of visual prompts to make you think about what really happened.

5 January 2014

[1] See note on Invictus.

[2] Judge Quartus De Wet is quoted in the book The Long Walk to Freedom as follows: ‘The crime of which the accused have been convicted, that is the main crime, the crime of conspiracy, is in essence one of high treason. The state has decided not to charge the crime in this form. Bearing this in mind and giving the matter very serious consideration I have decided not to impose the supreme penalty which in a case like this would usually be the proper penalty for the crime, but consistent with my duty that is the only leniency which I can show. The sentence in the case of all the accused will be one of life imprisonment.’