Idris Elba gives a powerful central performance in a biopic that treads respectfully while not shying from the uglier truths of the ANC's fight against apartheid
Justin Chadwick's decent, respectful and respectable account of Nelson Mandela's life is vigorously scripted by William Nicholson, and intelligently acted by Idris Elba and Naomie Harris; it appears by a remarkable stroke of fate at almost at the same historical moment as Mandela's death, an event for which the western media had long prepared the shooting script of their own response. The memorial event was naturally expected to be as calm and uplifting as an Olympic ceremony, just the sort of moment which in movie terms would furnish the opening scene, and from which the main drama would then unfold in flashback. In fact, of course, the event was disconcertingly chaotic and even faintly surreal, with press and media unsure quite how to cover the half-empty stadium, the booing of the incumbent president, the silly selfie, the meaningless sign-language. So perhaps it is a relief to return to the accepted pieties of the biopic.
In fact, and to give it its due, Nicholson's screenplay – based on Mandela's 1995 autobiography of the same name – avoids beginning with the traditional cliche of the old character looking back. It gives a clear, strong narrative line showing the burly young trial lawyer and amateur boxer joining the ANC to fight apartheid and police brutality, getting radicalised by the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, passionately leading an armed struggle and then once in prison transforming his anguish and rage into a Zen mastery of exile. He disarms his guards with a politician's knack of remembering their children's names and birthdays. Rather like a calmer version of Tolstoy's Father Sergius, his very retreat from the world gradually feeds his prestige and once free he is able to bring off a remarkable new metamorphosis into South African president and inspirational world leader.
Idris Elba conveys as much as any actor could of the enigma of Mandela's long experience in prison: it is a performance of sensitivity and force: his impersonation of the walking, talking Mandela is sharply observed, though it isn't just mimicry, and Naomie Harris is very good as Winnie, who (mostly) outside prison did not have the luxury of saintly inactivity and had to do what she saw as the dirty work of getting violent with the ANC's enemies and also with those traitors on her own team. It is a thoroughly well-managed movie, although it sees events purely in South African terms: it steers clear, for example, of the fact that US intelligence forces helped the 60s South African government to arrest Mandela in 1962. It could perhaps have probed a little further into the mystery of exactly what Nelson thought about his wife's activities while he was in prison and exactly what tensions were caused with his imprisoned comrades by finally deciding to negotiate with the government in the late 1980s.
And it misses out what is arguably the tenderest, most romantic part of his story: his third marriage to Graça Machel — although it is based on a book which predates this event. Perhaps a separate film could be made about just this love story.
One of the movie's shrewdest moments comes at the very beginning: the ambitious and smart young lawyer takes a case defending a black maid accused of stealing her white mistress's clothing. With studied insolence, Mandela takes one of the disputed undergarments, suggests it is the accused's rightful property and asks the woman to examine it while in the witness box. Of course, he gambles that this haughty racist woman would not tolerate being intimately questioned by a black man on such matters; she storms out of the court and the prosecution case collapses. This farcical moment shows the racial tension and racial contempt underlying the theoretical fairness of the law-court: it is an interesting counterpoint to Mandela's own defiance in the dock as he faces a guilty verdict in 1962.
But once he is in prison, it is Winnie's story which becomes fiercer and more contentious. She has to bear the burden of politics and the nasty business of activism. Is she not Nelson's own Umkhonto we Sizwe, the spear of the nation, his own armed wing – the Armalite to Nelson's promised ballot box? The film shows that she herself did time in prison, without ever accruing the aura that gathered around her husband. It is a potent performance from Naomie Harris, and the film does not shrink from the showing the grisly "necklacing": but the movie, perhaps like public opinion itself, is tonally unsure about Winnie, unable to triangulate the uneasy alternate needs to condemn and condone.
Unlike Lean's Lawrence or Attenborough's Gandhi, Justin Chadwick's subject is the stuff of contemporary newspaper headlines and current live-TV funeral coverage. If it is a bit stately, that is understandable: his life story really is extraordinary. The movie pays homage – in good faith.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/02/mandela-long-walk-freedom-review
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