THE ONLY THING that’s harder for an American to understand
than a South African accent is the rules of rugby. It seems to be kind
of like football, only with dorkier uniforms, lateral passing instead
of forward passing, and plenty of big, chummy, homoerotic scrums. In
Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, the 1995 Rugby World Cup is given the
task of drawing together a newly desegregated South Africa—it’s
not quite the equivalent of Nazis and Jews sorting out their
differences with a game of hopscotch, but one can’t help wonder if
perhaps this particular sporting match has acquired a tad more
significance than it can bear.
New South African President Nelson Mandela doesn’t think so. Morgan
Freeman plays him in a role that his freckles have been looking forward
to for decades; to his credit, the man of 1,000 voiceovers fully
inhabits his part with stiff-limbed authority. Matt Damon plays
Francois Pienaar, captain of the South African rugby team the
Springboks. Damon’s fine too, albeit in a part that doesn’t require him
to do much besides mumble with an Afrikaans accent, which sounds a lot
like your very untalented friend butchering an Australian accent after
a few drinks.
So a rugby game rehabilitates a formerly race-torn nation—it’s
a weird, audacious tale for a quintessentially American director like
Eastwood to pull off. He keeps the early part of Invictus somber
and muted, with Mandela attempting to reverse the perception many black
South Africans have of rugby: that it’s a white man’s game, a lingering
emblem of apartheid. Eastwood pulls out the stops for the championship
match, though, with the last 20 minutes of the film shot almost
entirely in slow motion, even as we frequently cut away from the action
to a series of minor, forgettable characters watching the game on
TV.
Invictus‘ story is a weighty and problematic one, not one
that’s well suited to cinema’s dramatic conventions. Eastwood’s minor
strokes work best: the caution of Mandela’s security detail, or
Pienaar’s mother cheering alongside her black maid, or the black boy
who nervously skulks around a police car trying to hear the game on the
radio. But Invictus keeps Mandela and Pienaar at arm’s
length—these are not characters, they are icons, and it’s not a
rugby match, it’s a country coming together. Still, it’s hard
not to find something uplifting here, or to keep from wishing we really
could solve immense sociological problems by tossing a ball around.