Clint Eastwood's Invictus - Dirty Harry's first movie of the Obama generation

Hello, welcome to my blog.

For the past year, I've been surely making my way through the directorial filmography of Clint Eastwood, the man who argued against an empty chair representing President Obama at the 2012 Republican National Convention. To many people around my age, this is all he will ever be: the man who fought a chair and, in the eyes of the public anyway, lost.

The latest movie of Clint's that I have watched is 2009's Invictus, a piece that outwardly denounces racism; this is perhaps the last movie anyone would think of in relation to Eastwood. If you watched the movie blindly, you wouldn't even be aware that he directed it until the end credits. My wish here is to express what I think is this movie's place in the greater Eastwoodian filmography, as well as provide some much-needed context.

By '09, Clint had just completed the run of what I would argue is his career height as an auteur -- Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, the two Iwo Jima films, Changeling, and his seminal Gran Torino (which also explores themes of racism). Gran Torino was one of the last times Eastwood, who was around 74 at the time, would be in front of the camera as opposed to behind it, as beginning in the early 2000s with his deeply disturbing and moving Mystic River, Eastwood seemed to find comfort behind the camera where no audience could see his old man blemishes. I always thought of him as more of a dramatic storyteller than an actor, anyway.

It is perhaps because of Clint's disappointment at not winning that elusive Best Actor Oscar from Gran Torino that Invictus feels a tad soulless in my opinion. It is a perfectly serviceable biographical movie about Nelson Mandela, and don't get it confused -- it's a great story. And it stars Morgan Freeman!

Now, wait, I hear you asking yourself, "Mandela? Isn't that the guy who supposedly died in prison, but actually didn't, but everyone thought he did, because of the Mandela effect?" And you would be correct. But Nelson Mandela, who died at 95 in 2013, was more than just the object of a case of mass false memory.

As a young man, Nelson Mandela was a political activitst against apartheid who was arrested by the government and subsequently spent nearly 30 years in prison. After his fateful release in 1990, he would become the first Preisdent of the then newly democratic South Africa. Apartheid (separation) plagued the majority of South Africa for decades. A white minority was in control, and throughout the land there was oppression, racism, inhumane violence, lack of basic necessities, the whole bit.

Of the different kinds of white South Africans were the Afrikaner, who get the most attention in this story. Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutch colonists, who have their own langauge and their own culture which seems to heavily center around rugby. It is as if rugby is a numbing drug for Afrikaners that helped them ignore the catastrophe that was their own country.

Despite the brutal history, Mandela believed that Afrikaners belong to South African soil as much as himself or anyone else, regardless of skin color.

Many of Mandela's supporters at this time wished to dissolve the national rugby team, it's name and colors, sort of like a punishment for the Afrikaners. Mandela did not like this idea. In fact, he pushed hard for support for the national team, the Springboks, under the mantra of 'One Team, One Country.' Mandela would interact directly with the captain of the team, Francois Pienaar, to inspire the Springboks to rise to the occassion and win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. And they did. On the streets of Cape Town immediately afterward, it seemed as though the whole nation, black and white, was out dancing in the streets, hugging. A nation that finally had made a great name for itself. Complete with anthem songs about how racism is bad.

After that rudimentary history lesson/plot summary, I can finally discuss why the film isn't one of my favorites of Clint Eastwood's, despite it's positive inclinations. Clint's directing style, ever since his debut Play Misty for Me (1971), has been to capture his stories spontaneously. This is a part of why he only ever does one or two takes, with few exceptions. He shoots from the hip. If he's got an idea, he's liable to go out and grab it. Invictus, however, is not given sufficient breathing room. The film, despite its length, focuses much on the sport of it all, sacrificing substantial segments of its runtime that could have been spent exploring Mandela's interesting surrounding world, giving proper context to many of the truly emotional moments there are to be found within the sporting moments. If you read the book and the movie back-to-back, much is forgiven, and this film would honestly work quite well in a classroom setting, which for all I know may be its intended purpose. But it was played in theatres. And there are moments that are strange.

I think much of the strangeness is because the script by Anthony Peckham is just a little ambitious. Peckham wrote in plenty of scenes intended to be intercut with one another, and lines of dialogue that will drop something only to pick it up many scenes later. It is not exactly attuned to Clint's consistently straightforward approach to directing.

Also, there are strangely anticlimatic moments when the film tries to build suspense only to throw it back in your face that you were worrying about nothing all along. This sort of drama is personified by one of the bodyguard characters, Jason, who protects Mandela and plans his security. There is a moment early on when Jason and another bodyguard, Linga, accompany Mandela for his morning walk. There are cuts of a van quickly swerving around the dark South African streets. The immediate thought of Jason (and some of the audience) is that this is someone out to get Mandela. Of course it's only a newspaper delivery guy trying to get his job done.

There is another moment like this late in the film that is even more strangely intriguing to me. During the World Cup Final, a plane starts heading right for the stadium. Jason again fears the worst. In reality, the plane was there in order to excite the spectators and support the team ('Go, Bokke!' was written on the underside of the plane. This actually happened, too.) What is interesting to me is that the World Cup would have been pre-9/11, so there was likely actually less anxiety about the plane in that moment than would have been felt by an American audience watching this film in 2009.

These moments don't always land well, because anyone with a basic knowledge of Mandela's life would know he would live throughout the movie. These scenes were likely written to satisfy the desire for conflict in American film. It creates dissonance between the messaging of the movie and the execution of it.

Clint has always been a proponent of the intelligent film audience. He doesn't like to hold anyone's hand, but rather give vague instructions in order to let one's imagination take them where they need to be in the story. But this is a true story and it needs added context to be understood with more emotionality, because as it stands, many of the typical Clint Eastwood demographic probably saw this film and couldn't grasp the true angle of Mandela's political campaign to reunite his country. Of course, nothing can compare to reality, but Clint's film is otherwise lacking in some of the spirit he previously has been able to express in his work. Maybe it's simply because his heart wasn't in it this time. Clint has been known for his conservative politics, so maybe he felt that this film was doing too much to placate the new generation of Obama voting liberals. I can't pretend to know why Eastwood wanted this film -- things like this are why the man fascinates me. It is very likely the case that I, even after a year of research and reading biographies about him, still misunderstand him.