From the first three (and only?) notes of its solemn piano score to the opening shot of white rugby players practicing adjacent to a poor, black children’s pick-up game, Clint Eastwood makes one thing perfectly clear about his latest:
You are not about to watch a movie; you are about to watch a prestige picture.
Continuing his unpredictable directing career, Eastwood’s Invictus is passable filmmaking coupled with didactic storytelling that sucks the life from the culturally rich country of South Africa. Instead of laying out the powerful events of Nelson Mandela’s election and his rallying of the South African rugby team as an effort to unite the country, the film chokeholds the audience and force feeds them inspiration that would make even Rudy cringe.
Eastwood has delivered one or two films a year for the past decade, and while he’s certainly had his hits, films like Invictus suffer from that rapid pace by taking the easy road with every turn. By the time South African boy band Overtone’s song “Colorblind” played over Mandela’s meeting with the white rugby players, my throat was soar from all the groaning.
And don’t get me started about the rugby. How do you turn a sport where hulking men scramble for a ball while knocking the living crap out of each other in to a dawdling void of excitement? Simple, set up your camera and shoot it. There’s no style or weight to any of these scenes, which is a big problem when rugby matches fill up fifty percent of your run time. There’s no indication how a team as bad as the South Africans managed whip themselves in to shape and pull the World Cup out their asses...well, beyond it being their destiny.
Invictus is Oscar fodder through and through. While some will gobble up its message (A good portion of my theater erupted in to applause when the credits rolled), most will wonder why any of it mattered.
Come on Mr. Eastwood, it’s not as easy as a black and white hand holding up the World Cup. Sorry.
