Clint Eastwood’s Invictus opens with a man walking free after 27 years in a cell. Nelson Mandela leaves Victor Verster Prison on 11 February 1990. Four years later, in the post-apartheid era, he is elected President of South Africa, and the country remains racially and economically divided.
The film, written by Anthony Peckham, runs 134 minutes and is based on John Carlin’s 2008 book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. It is a docudrama about sport, but the sport is the hook, not the subject.
Trailer, via American Film Institute.
Morgan Freeman and the Security Detail
Freeman plays Mandela. Damon plays Francois Pienaar, captain of the Springboks, the national rugby union team.
Mandela builds his security detail from both sides. He employs established white officers who served previous Presidents and pairs them with ANC security officers. The two groups share a mutual distrust. The film treats this arrangement as the model for everything that follows: proximity first, loyalty later.
The Springboks are a problem. The team had only recently returned to high-level international competition after apartheid was dismantled. South Africa was hosting the 1995 Rugby World Cup, so the Springboks got in automatically. Nobody expected them to do much.
Mandela watches a match against England and notices black South Africans cheering for England. He says he did the same while imprisoned on Robben Island. That detail lands harder than any speech in the film.
A Poem and a Persuasion
Mandela goes to the South African Sports Committee, now dominated by black members, and asks them to back the Springboks. They do not want to. He also meets Pienaar and tells him, in effect, that a World Cup win would unite the country. He recites William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus,” which inspired him during his time in prison. The film takes its title from that poem, and the poem does real work in the plot rather than sitting there as decoration.
The tagline is “His people needed a leader. He gave them a champion.” That is the whole architecture. Mandela needs a symbol that both races can hold at once, and a rugby team is the only one available.
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director | Clint Eastwood |
| Writer | Anthony Peckham |
| Runtime | 134 minutes |
| Source book | Playing the Enemy (John Carlin, 2008) |
| Mandela | Morgan Freeman |
| Pienaar | Matt Damon |
| Release (US) | 11 December 2009 |
| Budget | $50–60 million |
| Gross | $122.2 million |
Eastwood and Freeman had worked together twice before, on Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). Invictus is the third. It is the first Eastwood film with Damon, who returned for Hereafter (2010).
The supporting cast does what it can with thin roles:
- Tony Kgoroge as Jason Tshabalala
- Patrick Mofokeng as Linga Moonsamy
- Matt Stern as Hendrick Booyens
- Adjoa Andoh as Brenda Mazibuko
- Leleti Khumalo as Mary
Where Invictus Slows Down
The film is 134 minutes and feels it in the middle stretch. Eastwood shoots the rugby cleanly, but he is less interested in the game than in the faces around it, and some of those faces are written as types rather than people. The distrust between the security men is set up well, though the film does not do much with it.
Freeman is the reason to watch. He plays Mandela as a man doing arithmetic in his head while he smiles, and the performance earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Damon got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for a role that is mostly listening. Both nominations are fair. Damon’s Pienaar is a captain who has to decide whether he believes the pitch Mandela is selling, and Damon plays that doubt without announcing it.
What the film gets right is the scale of the bet. Mandela is not asking a rugby team to win for sport. He is asking them to be the one thing in the country that black and white South Africans can agree on.
What the Springboks Win
Invictus is a good film with a great central performance and a soft middle. It grossed $122.2 million on a budget of $50–60 million. The poem, the prison, the security detail, the Springboks — Eastwood connects them without forcing the seams.
It is not Unforgiven. It is not Million Dollar Baby. It is a film about a politician using a sport as a tool, and it understands that the tool only works if the people holding it believe in it.
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