FILM REVIEW: INVICTUS
REVIEWED BY LEXI LANDSMAN

IT’S February 11, 1990. Anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela is freed from Victor-Verster Prison in South Africa after spending 27 years behind bars.

To the moving sounds of the Zulu folk song Shosholoza (Go forward) we see a team of white players, in crisp uniforms playing on a well-kept green field.

Across the road, a group of black youths wearing torn clothing are playing soccer with a tattered ball on a barren field.

A motorcade with Mandela passes the street separating them. The black youths run to the fence, peering out the wire cheering and chanting “Mandela”, while the white players slowly walk over and frown, their expressions unmoved. Their Afrikaner coach tells them: “Remember this day boys, this is the day our country went to the dogs.”

It’s an apt opening for the much-anticipated film Invictus, directed by four-time Oscar winner Clint Eastwood, in portraying the country’s steep racial division.

The film tells the inspiring true story of how Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) joined forces with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Francois Pienaar (played by Matt Damon) to help unite the country.

Mandela cunningly managed to rally the country behind the mostly white Afrikaner squad that, to blacks, was a hated symbol of apartheid.

In a tour-de-force performance by Freeman, who plays Mandela with such conviction that it is often hard to believe it is not the leader himself, we see the newly elected president convince his party that sport is a universal language that can bring a racially and economically divided country together in the wake of apartheid.

“The past is the past,” Mandela announces, “we need to look to the future now.”

Damon delivers a stellar performance with a flawless Afrikaner accent and a remarkable physical transformation. Though his performance is an understated one and his lines are few, his presence is powerful.

“We’ve become more than just a rugby team,” he tells the players, later reminding them: “Times have changed and we need to change as well.”

Though the Springboks’ only Jewish player, Joel Stransky (played by Eastwood’s son Scott Eastwood), doesn’t have a major part in the film, he had a significant role in the team’s success in scoring all their points, including the winning kick in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. (Stransky was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame last year.)

The film has many emotive scenes that portray the sport’s ability to elicit political change, but the excessive use of slow-motion shots laboured the emotion at points.

One of the most moving scenes was when the players went out to the townships to teach the children rugby, which portrayed the individual change taking place in each player against the backdrop of the country’s gradual transformation.

Though there are some scenes that feel too forced and contrived, overall, Eastwood’s Invictus makes a powerful and moving statement, which is amplified by beautiful cinematography, emotive music and poetic cadence.

In a film that deftly portrays the power of forgiveness, it also rouses the paradoxical emotions many South African expats would identify with: love for the country and yet resentment for the indelible stain the apartheid regime left on it.

But it leaves us with the resounding message that Mandela tells his ­followers: “Forgiveness liberates the soul.”

Invictus is currently screening in cinemas.