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The overwhelmingly earnest Invictus is not your typical sports movie.
For starters, it's a feel-good Hollywood underdog tale set in a sport, rugby, that has almost no resonance with its intended North American audience -- except insofar as it sort of resembles American football.
For another, its theme plunges it a little deeper (though not too deeply) into what sports means to us beyond having a team to cheer for. The story of how South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, bet his political capital on a white icon sports franchise unifying the country, falls into that "too preposterous to not be real" category.
But it did happen.
In 1995, the newly non-apartheid South Africa hosted the World Cup of Rugby -- a sport revered by the white population and hated by blacks as a symbol of the old regime.
Going against the wishes of his own constituency, he quashed a movement to disband the iconic Springbok national team, and began a close relationship with the team captain, Francois Pienaar, exhorting him and the team to become active and visible in the black townships.
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Oh, and winning the World Cup wouldn't be a bad idea either.
The real-life sympatico between Mandela and Pienaar, a non-political Afrikaner who'd never even voted, is nicely captured by Morgan Freeman (who's been prepping for the role of Mandela for 14 years, and it shows) and a pumped-up Matt Damon, whose Afrikaner accent sounds authentic enough to these unschooled ears.
But though all the usual uphill-underdog sports-movie buttons are pushed, and newbies may come away with some familiarity-by-osmosis with the sport of rugby, Invictus (the title means "unconquerable") is Mandela/Freeman's show. His Mandela is a cute-as-a-button Zen-like moderate, surrounded by angry axe-grinders to be wheedled and seduced (and by a coterie of female exec staffers who fret over his overwork and lack of sleep).
Aside from his behind-the-scenes work as de facto GM of the nation-uniting Springboks, Mandela's conciliatory masterstroke is to merge his all-black personal bodyguard with the existing white security forces. This mixing of mutually untrusting "good guys" who become friends, gives the movie occasional echoes of white-cop/black-cop Hollywood slop, a manipulative feel-good look-how-quickly-racism-dissolves-when-we-work-together motif.
Inspiring and true as this is, by the end, it's laid on pretty thick with the close-up clasping of black and white hands, and the grasping of trophies by same.
That director Clint Eastwood falls upon such well-trodden Hollywood templates indicates some uncertainty on his part as to how to handle the story. There is practically no violence in this movie (other than the collision of bodies on the rugby field), no escalation of peril (despite the subplot about the security forces), and given that the ending is a fact of sports history, no nail-biting drama. (Even if you weren't aware of how the '95 Rugby World Cup turned out, you could safely assume they don't make movies about underdogs who lose).
Still, even if this isn't his best, Eastwood plays his cinematic cards well enough.
And all things considered, seeing a well-respected actor such as Freeman play the role he was born to play is reason enough to pay your twelve bucks plus popcorn.
(This film is rated PG)