If I had to chose my favorite all around director of the past decade it would be Clint Eastwood. No other director has put out as many quality films as he has the past ten years. Invictus (2009) is not his best film, but it certainly is another solid effort from the great director.
It is always difficult to do sports movies because the film has to be more about the process then the end result of the game. We watch sports because they are not scripted and we don't know what is going to happen, here you have a film about a tournament and a team where we already know the end results. So Eastwood's challenge here is to elevate the film to another level, beyond the sport, and he has mixed success with this. To try and achieve this he cast his old friend Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and shows us a sliver of this mans life during the 1995 world cup and what the tournament meant to Mandela as a person and as the leader of South Africa. Freeman is spot on as Mandela and surely deserves another Oscar nomination. Where the film could have done more is to give us a better understanding of the politics of the South African nation beyond the racial problems we saw represented through the Rugby team. The film made Mandela seem like he had a bit of tunnel vision when it came to all the problems he was certainly dealing with.
Matt Damon has never been better as the captain of the Springbok rugby team and the man that Mandela projected his hopes onto. Damon plays this character with a subtle weight of the world demeanor, but never goes over the top with outwardly emoting what he is certainly feeling inside. Damon should be sure to see a supporting actor nomination come the Oscars.
Despite my enduring love for Eastwood as a director, my criticism of his has always been the same, he depends to much on exposition and sometimes goes overboard with his sentimentality (I never want him to change because when it works it is great). In Invictus Eastwood sometimes tips the scales towards the overly sentimental way, especially during the last Rugby game. There are a few times he plays a cheesy song with slow motion and you wonder if your not watching Mighty Ducks 4. However Eastwood is a master director and despite the few times he goes over the top there are also many genuine moments that rang true and were inspiring. You know you are in the hands of a great director when your watching a political movie about Rugby (a sport I know nothing about) and am never once bored.
Should Invictus win best picture? No. But Eastwood should be proud of this film, and it is another notch in the great directors belt. I hope Eastwood can continue to make movies for another 20 years.
***1/2
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