Nelson Mandela, one of the most inspiring figures of modern history, died yesterday and the world joins together in mourning his loss and paying tribute to his courage, integrity, and vision. There are many movie portrayals of this extraordinary man, including two new films this year, but today we need to him speak for himself.
“Social equality is the only basis of human happiness.”
“Difficulties break some men but make others.”
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
“I came to accept that I have no right whatsoever to judge others in terms of my own customs.”
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
“Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front.”
“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
“I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days.”
“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”
May his memory be a blessing and may it inspire all of us to take up his great work and carry it forward.
Clint Eastwood tells the story of South Africa’s triumph in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the first World Cup after the end of apartheid. The title, “Invictus” comes from the inspiring poem that Nelson Mandela shared with the team’s captain, Francois Pienaar. The movie is respectful, dignified, and a little dull.
Mandela is played by Morgan Freeman, who shows us the new President’s grace and patience as well as his wisdom in treating everyone — even those who opposed the end of apartheid and believe his presidency is illegitimate — as countrymen, not enemies. He directs his black security detail to work with their white predecessors, and to remind them that it is important to smile at the people you are asking to move. Many people were skeptical that a black man who has spent 27 years in prison can lead a country where the white population had imposed legal segregation on the black citizens, asking “He can win an election. But can he run a country?”
And even his most loyal supporters wonder if he isn’t being unrealistic and trivial in hoping that a sports team can make a difference. “Unite for something more important than rugby,” one tells him. But the very first scene shows us Mandela, just after becoming President, driving down a road that has a wealthy, well-equipped white team playing on one side and a group of poor black boys in rags playing on the other. He knows that the rugby team can be a powerful symbol of unity and teamwork. He knows that all of the people of South Africa need to feel pride and a sense of shared purpose. He spent 27 years observing the Afrikaans guards at the prison and learning what was important to them. And so, he invites Pienaar (Matt Damon) to meet with him and he begins to memorize the names and faces of Pienaar’s team.
Eastwood has a good eye for striking images. While he does not handle the dynamism of the games well, he does make the rugby huddles look like something between a colorful Gordian knot and a many-legged creature. He has a gift for the small moments — a boy loitering near a police car so he can listen to the game on their radio, a housekeeper’s face when she is given a ticket to watch the game. He draws a connection between the two men — both are ferociously dedicated to making sure no one takes what is their away from them, not on their watch, and not today. But the impact is softened with dialog like “It’s not just a game!”
Mandela is such a transformative figure and Freeman such a distinguished actor that we are drawn in. It is impossible not to be stirred when he says, he does not want his followers to prove that they are what the whites feared; “We have to surprise them with compassion, restraint, and generosity.” But for a sports movie it is oddly lacking in momentum. Mandela tells Pienaar that he needs the team to win. We’re pretty sure that if they had not won, there would not be a movie about it (or, if there was, it would not be called the Latin word for “unconquered”). But that means we want to know why. We may get a sense of the way Mandela inspired Pienaar, but how did Pienaar inspire his team? Damon looks very buff and Pienaar seems like a nice guy, but this is rugby, one of the toughest sports on earth. How about showing us a little more ferocity? Some kind of strategy? Some individual personalities for the players? The New Zealand team they have to play in the big match does a little Maori war dance before the game that is more vivid and arresting than anything we see from the team we are supposed to be rooting for. Eastwood tells us this is all very important, but he never really shows us.
This is the smartest alien movie in quite a while. But then movies about creatures from other planets are never about the aliens; they’re about the humans, and about what being human really means.
It has cool and creepy giant insect-looking aliens and there are very cool sci-fi weapons and shoot-outs and chases and space ships and a super-cool giant insect-robot thing, and it is very exciting and scary and sometimes extremely gross (but in a cool, sci-fi way). But, like all great science fiction, it is in aid of speculative allegory. The interactions between humans and aliens all the more powerful for being understated, taken for granted, and filmed in an intimate, low-key fashion that makes it feel like a documentary. Instead of running around and shrieking, this story posits an even more believable human reaction to an alien invasion — a bureaucratic one.
Humanity’s history sometimes seems to come down to the lines we draw, metaphorically and literally. Boundaries establish real estate ownership, communities, and countries, and battles over those boundaries have continued, in some cases, over millennia. We draw lines to distinguish ourselves from others and we draw lines to separate others from ourselves. This movie is not about an invasion from outer space. It is about life twenty years after an invasion. At first, the huge spaceship just hovered over Johannesburg. There was no attack, no communication of any kind. Finally, the South Africans went up to the ship and broke in to find the creatures badly malnourished and ill.
Two decades later, as this movie begins, the humans and aliens exist in uneasy proximity, assigned to “District 9,” fatuously assigned generic human names like “Christopher Johnson” and provided the flimsiest of “rights.” In the name of “humanitarianism,” they are living in the title area, little more than a junkyard. The government has outsourced the supervision responsibility to a contractor. The creatures are exploited by crooks, and called by derogatory epithets like “prawns” (the South African term for shrimp), based on their physical resemblance.
The alien population has grown and so the entire community is about to be “relocated” (evicted) to a new facility, a slum even more remote and meager than the current one, with tents instead of corrugated huts. Wikus Van De Merwe (brilliant newcomer Sharlto Copley) is selected by his boss, who is also his father-in-law, to oversee the “relocation.” This involves, for some absurd reason, going hut to hut with clipboards eliciting some form of “consent.” Copley, much of whose dialog is reportedly improvised, is terrific as the well-meaning but hopelessly overmatched bureaucrat, who has no idea of how offensive he is or how much he is missing as he talks to the company’s camera recording what he thinks will be his triumphant moment. When he unexpectedly inhales an alien substance, he is at first more worried about looking like he knows what he is doing on film than about any possible harm. But soon he is feeling sick. And then things really get out of, uh, hand.
This is where Copley really takes off as Wilkus has to draw on depths of courage, skepticism, analytic ability, and trust he never anticipated. He goes through external and internal changes raising questions about who and what is truly human and he shifts loyalties more than once. The movie shifts, too, combining the documentary footage with news accounts and other perspectives to show us what Wilkus is seeing but to get a glimpse of what lies ahead of him — or is chasing him.
Its setting in Johannesburg immediately suggests the metaphor of apartheid (and some critics have objected to it as a superficial or slanted portrayal — see links below). The film is more clever and ambitious than that. Just as the classic original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is claimed by both the right and the left as representing their side, this is a movie that is designed to be discussed and argued over. It is those conversations about Its meaning in light of the way that struggles with the notion of “the other” can inspire both the best and the worst of what it means to be human.
Celebrate the 90th birthday this week of one of history’s greatest leaders, Nelson Mandela, with one of the fine films about his extraordinary perseverance, vision, courage, and leadership. The story of the massive social change he achieved without violence is profoundly moving and inspiring and one that all families should understand and discuss. Perhaps his greatest contribution is the notion of reconciliation and forgiveness rather than retribution and punishment, a lesson the world will need to recover from its current conflicts.
The documentary, Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation follows Mandela from his early years as one of nine children of a polygamist father assigned the name “Nelson” by a teacher instead of his tribal name to his 27 years in prison, his election to the Presidency of South Africa and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The made-for-television Mandela & De Klerk (PG-13 for disturbing images of political violence) has Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine as Mandela and his co-Nobel awardee F.W. de Klerk. Both are outstanding.
follows Mandela from his early years as one of nine children of a polygamist father assigned the name “Nelson” by a teacher instead of his tribal name to his 27 years in prison, his election to the Presidency of South Africa and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The made-for-television 
(PG-13 for disturbing images of political violence) has Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine as Mandela and his co-Nobel awardee F.W. de Klerk. Both are outstanding.