Clint Eastwood’s Invictus: Carrots 6, Sticks 0

December 14th, 2009 by Jani

Verdict: carrots for Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of John Carlin’s Invictus. One reviewer, Kevin McCallum – who co-wrote the Penguin Book of South African Sports Trivia – is more begrudging than the rest (as might be expected of a man who knows offhand that “the Springboks never played at King’s Park in 1994″), but ultimately signals orange. The other reviews are from AO Scott, Kenneth Turan, Richard Corliss, Barry Ronge and Niel Bekker:

It may not seem obvious at first, but Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” a rousing true story of athletic triumph, is also that director’s latest exploration of revenge, the defining theme of his career. It is hard to think of an actor or a filmmaker who so cleanly embodies a single human impulse in the way that Mr. Eastwood — from “Pale Rider” to “Mystic River,” from Dirty Harry to “Gran Torino” — personifies the urge to get even.

Complete review by AO Scott in The New York Times

“Invictus” opens with a particularly illustrative tableau centering on a 1990 motorcade driving a just-freed Mandela from his Robben Island prison. On one side of the road, black South Africans take time out from soccer to cheer loudly, while on the other side their white counterparts are playing rugby and listening as their coach says: “It’s the terrorist Mandela. They let him out. This is the day our country went to the dogs.”

Complete review by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times

“He can win an election,” an opposition newspaper groused about its nation’s first black President, but can he run a country? The subject of this headline was not Barack Obama in 2008 but Nelson Mandela in 1994. He emerged from 27 years as a political prisoner to be voted into South Africa’s highest office, ending decades of apartheid in a lightning flash of popular will. All he had to do was end crime, create jobs … and help the nation’s hapless rugby team, the Springboks, win a world championship.

Complete review by Richard Corliss in Time

The ball swings to Pieter Hendriks! He goes wide! He’s past the Australian defence! He scores! In the right-hand corner! Hang on… the right-hand corner?
How foggy one’s memory can be after almost one-and- a-half decades. I was sure Hendriks scored that try against Australia in the left-hand corner at Newlands in 1995. But this is Invictus and, sports fans, I am but a picky sports hack, a scoundrel for detail (when it suits me, of course).

Complete review by Kevin McCallum at IOL Tonight

The film is not about the game itself, even though the action is artfully displayed. The real drama is about the political strategy of reconciliation that Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) devised around the showcase of the World Cup.
As the first president of post-apartheid South Africa, Madiba was aware of the potentially destructive hostility between blacks and whites, and was wary of the explosive triumphalism that could so easily have spilled over into violence.

Complete review by Barry Ronge in the Sunday Times

There will be a time, long from now, when no one remembers what the old “New South Africa” was like, and the events that made it such a unique, exciting time in our country’s history will become fuzzy memories. Invictus may not be the sports movie or drama that we hoped it would be, but in transporting us Rainbow denizens back to our first moments of democracy, it does a fantastic job.