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MORGAN FREEMAN plays  Nelson Mandela and MATT DAMON is the captain of South Africa’s rugby team in the drama Invictus

By Maggie Scott

With his new film Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s humanitarianism has just about eclipsed his larger-than-life tough guy image as the legacy he will leave the world.

Although he does not appear in this dramatic rendering of an important moment in the 1990s in the new government of South African leader, Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), one can feel in its ambiance the essence of Eastwood’s zeal for portraits of extraordinary men (and women) in extraordinary circumstances— especially the perseverance of moral character, the transcendence of spirit in the face of unrelenting brutality.

With that zeal once more on display here with part of the story of Mandela, it’s not much of a surprise that one of two hooks of its plot comes from a poem whose title gives the film its title. Its author is a Victorian writer by the name of William Ernest Henley.

Within its four stanzas Mandela found part of the source for the strength he needed to sustain sanity, faith, resolution through twenty-seven years of imprisonment.  Most people have heard its final two lines, although they may not be able to place them; so it would help to quote the poem here:

Out of the night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

A copy of this poem finds its way at one point in the story to the captain (Matt Damon) of a rugby team called the Springboks.  This team, once a potent symbol of the racist regime, has been chosen by Mandela as his non-violent weapon against mounting fragmentation of the country into warring rival factions.  This is the other hook in the story written by Anthony Peckham (who adapted the John Carlin book).

Along with an accounting of the effort Mandela faced in taking the reins of office and changing both blacks’ and whites’ entrenched ways of thinking, Eastwood and Peckham give audiences a down-on-its luck team pounding its way to a World Cup title. All with the extra burden of their President’s expectation that their victory could go a long way toward uniting their country.

This scheme provides several opportunities for Mandela to deliver passionate speeches about the need for forgiveness and about serving the nation.  Mandela’s story is a great story; and even one tiny fragment of that story is a gift and a challenge to humanity.

Unfortunately, the dramatic structure of the movie suffers from scratching-the-surface characterizations and a sentimentality-padded battering of viewers no doubt eager to absorb the manner in which Mandela offered a hand of tolerance and inclusion to the architects and implementers of apartheid with the eloquence of his speeches for both the mighty and the marginalized.

Freeman bears little physical resemblance to Mandela, which does not seem to faze him a bit when it comes to being warmly and deeply convincing as the man who believed in his nation’s “unconquerable soul.”   A Warner Bros. release, rated PG-13 for brief strong language.

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