Cinema Nova, 21/1/10
Status: Ever so slightly behind
Only one movie last week – I went to the beach instead. If you ask me, it’s a massive oversight that there is no cinema in Portarlington (population 3000 people and several million mussels, minus, of course, the ones in my tummy). Moving on.
Invictus. Yes, well. I think director CLINT EASTWOOD (Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby) might have outsourced the final third of the film to another (not very talented) director. What starts out as a fairly engaging biopic-type account of Nelson Mandela (played by MORGAN FREEMAN) becoming the first black president in a newly-post-apartheid South Africa devolves into a bland, run-of-the-mill sports movie.
I’m can't be certain, but I think the take-home message of the film was the ridiculous idea that the Springbok’s 1995 World Cup win cured South Africa of entrenched apartheid. I would expect this from the screenwriter who brought us Sherlock Holmes, but I expect more from Eastwood.
The whole film feels unsteady, somehow. Freeman’s Mandela flips between political visionary and naïve, foundering obsessive; the tone flops from political drama to sports movie; the camera work jumps from interesting to poxy; the writing leaps from insightful commentary to cliché; and Freeman’s South African accent is flapping all over the place.
Personal or emotional journey is a massive, gaping, gawping hole in Invictus. The journey of an entire country (even simplified to the point of grotesque caricature) is simply too big to be engaging as a dramatized story. The prime candidate to be our ‘in’ and have a journey (of any kind) is MATT “Jason Bourne” DAMON’s rugby captain. He is, sadly, not really used for much at all.
If the 1995 Rugby World Cup Final was actually a contest between the two most disappointing aspects of this film, it’d be a 12-all tie between the writing and Morgan Freeman’s accent.
