About Moving On

Clint Eastwood delivers another solid film with “Invictus,� the story of the South African rugby team’s underdog run to the 1995 World Cup championship and new South African president Nelson Mandela’s involvement.

Mandela (Morgan Freeman) latches on to the mostly white team as a symbol of the new nation, despite heated opposition from his own supporters, who regard the Springboks as a symbol of the old apartheid regime. He meets with team captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) and gently tells him how a championship would boost the nation’s morale.

   The film is about old enemies coming together, and it plays out in the subplots. The initial animus between the white and black presidential security men turns into comradeship; the team goes into the townships (where soccer, not rugby, is king) to conduct coaching clinics;  the Pienaar household changes, as the black domestic worker gets to attend the final against the New Zealand All-Blacks with the family.

Even a young black kid, collecting old bottles and keeping an ear cocked to the broadcast of the game coming from the car radio of a couple of surly white municipal workers, becomes part of the celebration by the time the overtime thriller is won — by the Springboks, of course.

   It seems a little too pat — surely decades of oppression cannot be erased by a rugby title.

And the film is rather long, at almost two and a half hours.

   But these are quibbles. It’s a thoroughly nice movie. People forgive and move on. The good guys win. The audience in the theater laughed, cheered and clapped.

And in a minor miracle for a contemporary American movie, nobody smokes and there are only two instances of cussing, both appropriate in context.

   Eastwood even makes Victorian poetry cool; William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem “Invictus,â€� written out by Mandela on presidential stationery for Pienaar’s consideration and repeated in voiceover really clicks. Go see it, and bring the kids.