I have just seen Invictus for the first time and even though I took a seven hour nap in the middle of it, I made it to the end. I should be inspired. I heard inspirational speeches and music, saw a sports team win, and watched a leader attempt to heal a post-apartheid nation. Instead I feel like I was just lectured on the meaning of inspiration and how one goes about being inspiring.
As a lecture, this film succeeds brilliantly. Characters walk back and forth talking at each other about destiny and the merits of a positive attitude. It's like having a life coach!
Unfortunately this also sucks the drama right out of the room as Invictus becomes a tedious lesson in dull storytelling.
Because I seriously don't have time to do it myself, here's the brief plot synopsis from IMDB, written by user "AlfieHitchie":
The film tells the inspiring true story of how Nelson Mandela joined forces with the captain of South Africa's rugby team to help unite their country. Newly elected President Mandela knows his nation remains racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Believing he can bring his people together through the universal language of sport, Mandela rallies South Africa's rugby team as they make their historic run to the 1995 Rugby World Cup Championship match.
Let me repeat a couple words for you: RUGBY TEAM. What.
First of all, I was pretty convinced that this film was about soccer, or as the rest of the world calls it, GOAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL! So when the film gets rolling and I see this guy, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) playing fucking rugby, I think to myself, "Wow. This is going to be nuts teaching this rugby player how to play soccer. Plus, he'll have to actually play well enough to win the WORLD CUP." Now that's a movie.
Instead Invictus is about rugby. A sport that, as an American, I have little knowledge of. Naturally I think, "Well, Clint Eastwood's an American, and as a competent director he'll know that most Americans don't know about rugby so he'll use a scene in the film to teach the audience about it." That scene comes during the first half of the film in this form: Matt Damon tells a poor African child that you can only pass the ball sideways or backwards. THAT'S ALL YOU GET. Good luck figuring out what the hell is going on during the games, because you're basically reduced to knowing when someone scores or doesn't score. Fear not, though, for there are any number of scenes in which sweaty man-beasts grunt and grapple for reasons I will never understand. I spent more time wondering how they recorded the grunts (one guy looping the grunt or a team of players grunting for real?) than I did about the game. Not good.
So maybe sport itself isn't important. Maybe Invictus is about Mandela uniting Africa through sport. Mandela (Morgan Freeman) released from nearly 30 years in prison in 1990 and elected President of South Africa in 1994, must sort out a nation bitterly divided by apartheid, which is a fancy word for government sanctioned racial segregation. White people don't like this at all since they think Mandela will be a threat to their established power and control of the massive poor minority. Assassins immediately set to work trying relentlessly to... deliver papers. Oh. Well at least the papers are interesting: "He Can Win an Election, But Can He Run A Country?" Well? Can you, Obama? Can you?! Oh, sorry, I got confused. Let me just take a few pills and... there we go. Back on track.
After absolutely no one tries to kill Mandela he asks Pienaar to win the World Cup. Call me crazy, but isn't that what a rugby team in the Rugby World Cup should be trying to do anyway? To win? Things (should) get interesting when he tells Pienaar that the reason he needs to win is to unify the country. Oddly, this is the most boring scene in the film. Matt Damon is a fine actor with a passable South African accent, but his character has nothing to do in any scene in the film. His dad is shown to be a bitter racist who loves apartheid. Damon never gets a chance to voice his opinion on the subject, listens to Mandela and says, "OK," and proceeds to win the game. Who cares? There is not even a moments hesitation. What will his father think? Was Pienaar a racist before the events of this film? Was Mandela so charismatic that he couldn't have said no if he wanted to?
Then we get a bunch of scenes where Damon has to convince his teammates to win the World Cup (something they should want anyway) and Mandela telling everyone how much he believes in South Africa's rugby team, the Springboks. But it's really about Mandela preaching about forgiveness. In every scene. Something for which, ironically, I cannot forgive the screenwriter. Anthony Peckham, who based his screenplay on a book by John Carlin that I didn't read, seems to have an amazing gift for writing "on-the-nose" dialogue. This is what screenwriters refer to when the dialog has absolutely no subtext or subtlety of any kind. It turns into a lot of, "It's our destiny!" and "Our country needs this!" crap. Here are some other examples:
"Times change. We need to change as well." Yeeeaaahhhhhh.
"He invited me to tea."
"Who?"
"The President." Yeeeaaahhhhhh.
"This rugby, as a political calculation..."
"It is a HUMAN calculation!" Yeeeaaahhhhhh.
I added all of David Caruso's CSI Miami moments in there myself; don't be jealous. If this dialogue sounds ridiculous it's because it IS ridiculous. In reality, people rarely, if ever, say things like, "It's our destiny!" Well, I know it's your destiny if the film shows you fulfilling your destiny and not because you say it's your destiny. Showing things happening in a film is a big plus because, you know, it's a film.
A film is about the most important time in a character's life. We don't see Marty McFly eating dinner and skateboarding during the year before he travels through time. We get to see his adventure through time and how his character changes.
So the players have to train a lot and then one of them messes up his hamstring and I guess he was supposed to be an amazing player (or maybe it was that he was the only black player on the team and would somehow bridge the racial gap just by being black) because everyone gets upset. Why didn't we see him get hurt? But then in the next scene he's fine. Phew. Dodged a bullet. I think. I don't know.
The final game finally approaches and everyone feels the pressure of, you know, winning the World Cup because it will somehow allow black people and white people to cheer for the same thing without making their potentially racist brains implode. As with the initial attempted assassination scene that turned out to be nothing, a plane flies over the rugby field and everyone loses their shit and then they see that the pilots wrote "Good Luck" on the belly of the plane. So it was almost dramatic.
Then we get all the slow motion stuff and then the Springboks win and South Africa is saved from itself and everything there is fine. What's that? Oh. Oh, that's - that's awful. Sorry, I just saw Invictus and thought - no, no you're right. That makes sense.
What is Invictus and what is its point? It isn't a biographical film really, though that is certainly something of which Nelson Mandela is worthy. Gandhi got a film. Jesus has had a few films. Malcolm X was great. Invictus marginalizes Mandela's achievements to reduce the man to a rugby fan. I understand that Hollywood (and Freeman in particular) had been looking to get a Mandela project made for about a decade. It's just sort of strange that this is what they came up with. Mandela's presented as a man who has a tremendous sense of forgiveness because, as we are constantly reminded, he was in prison for 30 years. It's a shame that his character was reduced to this two dimensional figure when the man himself is so much more.
Invictus is also not a sports film, since there are no real obstacles that truly get in the way. The Springboks biggest challenge is a tall guy on the New Zealand team. Sports films that tend to work are about a team full of losers (The Bad News Bears, The Replacements) overcoming their own disastrous failures to succeed as a team. Invictus is about a team of guys who are asked to win for the sake of their country and sort of go, "Oh, man! OK fine. But we're not going to like it!"
What Invictus suffers from almost exclusively is the "But that's what happened in real life!" script. One of the first things screenwriters must let go of is this inherent need to tell things as they happened. I understand that in real life Francois Pienaar probably went right along with Mandela's plan to win the World Cup. In real life a player probably hurt his hamstring. But who cares unless he was the most valuable player and they couldn't possibly win without him? Drama comes from creating obstacles and drama is something this film simply lacked.
In the end, the major obstacle of racism is still there and still is today. The US has had far more time to overcome the lasting effects of slavery then segregation and yet the issues remain. They are a part of us. It is unlikely that a World Cup win, while admirable and unifying, ended racism and that's not what Eastwood is saying with Invictus. If there could be a main character here, it should be South Africa, because the game was one of the most important times in the country's history.
Eastwood has made some fantastic films and I've generally liked his work. But what Invictus absolutely fails to do on every single level is to raise the stakes. No one tries to kill Mandela. No player fails in his quest to win. No violence or discord illustrates the need for unity. Practically no one experiences moments of doubt or introspection.
Invictus is a film epic in form that is not life changing or even dramatic at heart. Worst of all, Invictus attempts to inspire... but in words alone, not actions.
[Zachariah lives and works in Los Angeles. To read more by Zachariah, check out his profile.]
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