Freeman, Damon rescue Clint’s Mandela movie

Not too far into Invictus, you can see why the two leads, Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, were shortlisted this week for acting Oscars. But you can also see why there was no Academy Award nomination for the director or for best picture.

It may have grand designs on history, but director Clint Eastwood reduces Nelson Mandela's first momentous and turbulent year in office to little more than a Hollywood heart-warmer wrapped around a sporting fable.

In 1995, with many white South Africans fearing black rule and many black citizens hoping for revenge, the new President urgently needed to find a symbol to unite the country. Controversially he decided on the Springboks rugby team - once the symbol of old white rule - and set about inspiring the players, against all odds, to win the Rugby World Cup.
 
To achieve this aim, Mandela (Freeman) must woo the Springboks' Afrikaner captain Francois Pienaar (Damon). The President invites Pienaar to tea and quotes inspiring lines from the Victorian-era poem from which the film takes its name - "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul". A converted Pienaar gushingly describes Mandela as "the greatest man I've ever met".
 
The rest of the film - which is based on journalist John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy - follows the Springboks as they rise through the knock-out stages of the World Cup and reach the final. This unlikely turn of events sees them play the then-great New Zealand All Blacks in front of 62,000 fans, including Mandela, at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium.
 
While many critics have been loathe to lay into one of Hollywood’s elder statesmen, some reviewers have admitted to finding Eastwood’s film indulgent and unimaginative. Variety said the film had a "predictable trajectory" and the Hollywood Reporter called it "conventional". Meanwhile the Guardian's Xan Brooks called it "more monument than motion picture: handsome, reverent and heavy... Judged in terms of creativity, spectacle and drama, Invictus might as well be stuck on Robben Island".
 
What has saved the film are its lead performances. Freeman plays Mandela with "gravity, grace and a crucial spark of mischief", as A O Scott put it in the New York Times while a beefed-up Damon - unrecognisable from his turn as a flabby businessman in The Informant - plays the blond, chiseled Pienaar with an impeccable Afrikaner accent.

As Variety's Todd McCarthy put it: "It's meant as highest praise to say that, if he weren't  recognisable film star, you'd never think [Damon] were anything other than a South African rubgy star". 

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:
A.O. Scott, the New York Times: "That the sport is as alien to most Americans as it is to black South Africans presents its challenges, but by the end you might care about rugby more than you thought you would, even if it remains harder to understand than politics."

Kirk Honeycutt, the Hollywood Reporter: "The film enters neither of their lives. It's a film about a nation's psyche, not its individuals. Where you would love a vigorous portrayal of two larger-than-life personalities, the film tiptoes through polite scenes where everyone speaks and acts with political correctness."

Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: "Instead of a thriller, war movie or western, the director has turned out a stirring drama about South African leader Nelson Mandela, blending entertainment, social message and history lesson in a way that recalls such decades-old films as The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. The more things change, the more they remain the same." ·