Matt Damon’s ready to go in, coach – ‘Invictus’ Review

Posted on January 11, 2010 - 9:39pm by michael Morgan Freeman is the obvious choice for any biopic about Nelson Mandela, not only because he’s been in talks to do some Mandela movie for the last decade or so, but because he’s one of our best and most respected actors and, as he showed in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, he has no problem with accents. Matt Damon also started his career in Good Will Hunting in which he nailed a Boston accent so well that he even fooled the city’s natives. I have a good friend who was born and raised in Boston, and until I asked him yesterday what he thought of Damon’s accent in the movie, he said he didn’t even realize that he was doing an accent. Now in Invictus, Damon proves his vocal ability once again by nailing a South African accent without a single line delivered with that forced feeling that even the greatest actors let slip at least once or twice in each verbally altered role. On the other hand, the movie is about the crippled political environment that Nelson Mandela is faced with upon his release from 30 years of imprisonment, and his subsequent efforts to bring his people together. This is not typically the kind of thing to attract a younger audience – the very people that Matt Damon generally appeals to. This may actually be why he was chosen for the role. And as for Morgan Freeman, well, if you’ve ever seen a picture of Nelson Mandela, any other choice would have been ludicrous. The movie begins with Mandela’s trumpeted release from prison and then assumes you already know all the unimportant details of why he was jailed in the first place (sabotage and other such crimes in his movement against apartheid – which is essentially one racial group establishing dominance over another through violence), and then focuses on his efforts to bring the long-divided blacks and whites of his country together. Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, the captain of the Springboks, the South African rubgy team. As the 1995 Rugby World Cup approaches Mandela begins to realize that the importance of rugby to both the blacks and white of his country may be the very key to what brings everyone together after so many years of violent segregation. Clint Eastwood’s stolid direction adds no unnecessary frills, and he manages to craft a compelling political film and sports film at the same time. This is no small task, but nothing compared to Mandela’s task of ending the endless cycle of violence and fear that has overtaken his country. It may seem irresponsible for a nation’s president to be glancing at his watch during governmental meetings, wondering about the latest rugby match, but Mandela’s achievement was in his recognition of the national importance of the rugby team, and the role that they might play in bringing a long-overdue peace to the country. If I have one complaint about the movie, it’s that they may have overdone Mandela’s greatness a little bit. His greatness is not in question, but I think there are ways to present this kind of greatness without giving us a series of manufactured scenes intricately designed to give opportunities to illustrate it. There is, for example, the obligatory scene where someone asks him about his family, he pauses dramatically, and says, “I have a very large family. 42 million…”  Mandela is, however, one of the greatest men in modern history, often compared to Gandhi, which is why some of these constructed and even cheesy scenes don’t really do him justice. The sports portion of the movie is rousing as well, and it generates momentum through Eastwood’s skilled portrayal of Mandela and the world around him. Freeman inhabits his role, making us not only understand his thought processes, but also to care deeply about his success in his attempts to unify his country. This adds a level of depth to the scenes on the rugby field that you don’t usually find in sports movies. And the way that Eastwood combines these two generally unrelated genres represents one of the greatest strengths of the movie. It’s not uncommon that a movie will try to combine too many different styles (usually to widen the target audience – like the goofball teen romance plunked down in the middle of Pearl Harbor) successfully, but Eastwood has certainly done it here. It’s a highly entertaining sports film that might even teach you something about history. The Bean Meter