Clint Eastwood's "Invictus' (2nd review)

I am the master of my fate,
I am the Captain of my soul.

When I was in my teens and 20s, those lines from W.E. Healey's Invictus were usually recited ironically, with a knowing sneer. They were obviously a bit of Victorian schoolboy rhetoric, like "Forward the light brigade, was there a man dismayed?" (As if any sane person wouldn't be.)

In Clint Eastwood's film Invictus, these lines acquire new life. Nelson Mandela claims Healey's poem sustained him during his long imprisonment, and Morgan Freeman as Mandela reads the whole text, voice over, in a haunting scene that accompanies the words with images of Mandela's 27 years in captivity.

I looked up the poem after I watched the DVD of the film. Henley developed a tubercular bone disease when he was 12, and one of his legs had to be amputated. The disease spread to the other leg when he was 24; this time he sought out Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic medicine, and saved his leg by enduring a 20-month ordeal.

Henley wrote Invictus ("Unconquered") during his months in the hospital. When he wrote "Out of the night that threatens me,/ Black as the Pit from pole to pole," he wasn't fantasizing about the trials of an imaginary 19th-Century romantic hero.

Another noble sports cause

I put off seeing Invictus because the blurbs made it sound like one more movie in which a Noble Cause adds dubious significance to a sports upset. I rented it mostly because I thought it would be interesting to see a movie about rugby.

The film's opening shots establish the divide at the story's heart. On one side of a road, shabbily dressed black children play soccer in a vacant field. On the other side, well-fed young whites play rugby in a properly laid out, manicured playing field. Blacks play soccer. Whites play rugby.

In South Africa this situation was exacerbated by a national oddity. Soccer is an English game that's become the leading spectator sport in most countries. Rugby is an English game that's normally a secondary sport associated with Anglophiles. But in South Africa, it's the national sport of the Dutch-descended Afrikaners.

To South African blacks, the national rugby team was linked to the people primarily responsible for apartheid. They cheered for the opposition when the team played foreigners. Its team colors were the colors of the Afrikaner flag.

Football, without pause

The script wisely avoids trying to explain the rules of rugby to those of us who didn't attend a British public school. A scene in which the South African players conduct a clinic for black children establishes that the forward pass is prohibited.

Scenes during games demonstrate that you can score by kicking the ball over the goalposts (something I didn't know). The score resembles a field goal in American football but it's done on the fly, as in soccer, without any of this pausing-for-downs stuff that Americans added to football. Other than that, non-fans can let the scoreboard clarify the significance of all the unprotected heaving and tackling taking place on the screen.

The ads for Invictus suggest that South Africa's victory in the rugby World Cup merely gave the country a morale boost during a difficult time— the transition from apartheid to black majority rule. But the film actually concerns something more complicated.

Angry minority

Mandela notes in the movie that he had become president of a country in which whites still controlled the economy and much of the government. But that was only part of the problem.

The Afrikaners were a minority in a country where the overwhelming majority had every reason to hate them. Mandela had to reassure the Afrikaners while containing the anger of his own people.

Rugby had become an important aspect of Afrikaner culture. Mandela reassured the Afrikaners by overruling his supporters and maintaining the traditional national team, the Springboks, complete with its detested colors. Then he went a step further and transformed the Springboks into a team that represented the entire nation, black and white.

Mandela's personal touch

Invictus presents a low-key look at the day-to-day tensions involved in a major handover. Mandela emerges as an aging, sensitive statesman who has acquired the arts of the practical politician despite his decades in prison. He methodically memorizes the names and faces of every member of the Springboks, for example, so he can greet each of them by name when he makes a ceremonial appearance on the field.

Time will tell whether Mandela's attempt to create an integrated society will last. But he guided the new South Africa through its first years without the retributive massacres that have convulsed other countries where a hated minority yielded power to a massive majority. In this world, that's a championship achievement.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.