Our recent trend of biographical sports pictures continues with Invictus, but the poker princess, the rock-climber, the chess prodigy and the walk-on football player have nothing on the one and only Nelson Mandela.
Morgan Freeman does a terrific job and it feels like he was born to play the Madiba in Clint Eastwood's rugby flick. Eastwood's filmmaking style certainly isn't subtle, but using sport to try to bond a country that's been ripped apart by apartheid is an effective approach. If you don't know much about rugby, you aren't going to learn much by watching Matt Damon and company play it in this movie, but that's just a clothesline for the racial reconciliation that Mandela was trying so hard to achieve anyway.
So get into a scrum and empathize with someone different than you as we chat about Invictus.
Also, a couple of corrections: Eastwood will be 91 this May, not in December, and Dina was his much-younger wife, not his daughter, when they were making this movie over a decade ago.
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