Movie review: Invictus

Three noncommercial movie showings over the next seven nights, ranging from an American popular cliche to an unseen-but-surely-too-eccentric-for-me one that may well be the most important one from a cinematic point of view.

The cliche is A Christmas Story, the 1983 one about the little boy who just HAS to get a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, no matter what his mother and father and even Santa Claus himself say about it; it's the most guaranteed enjoyable-by-everybody of the three, and it shows tonight at 7 in the Orpheum. The eccentric one is Band Apart, Band of Outsiders, from France in 1964, and the reason I disparage it is it's by Jean-Luc Godard, whom I despise as a cinematic showoff bent on impressing us with his independence of all cinematic rules and conventions. But Pauline Kael called Band of Outsiders "perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film" and it's a variation on American crime fiction, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, at the Murdock, 536 North Broadway, at 7:30 tomorrow night. And Sunday, the Blank Page gallery at 917 West Douglas offers Sonic Outlaws, a documentary about a famous case of copyright infringement involving Negativeland U2, a label that almost has to mean more to you than it does to me, at 7:30 Sunday.

And commercially, we have Invictus, a movie I tried to like better than I could, because I like Clint Eastwood as a director and because it tries to tell us about Nelson Mandela, on of the authentic heroes of the twentieth century. But unfortunately, it is all built upon the tired cliches of the American sports movies, where everything depends on Winning the Big Game for Scranton High, as Jack Armstrong used to put it, or for the Gipper, as Ronald Reagan once did, and I just can't absorb the idea of athletics as matters of huge consequence. In this case, it's win the rugby World Cup for all of South Africa, which is just emerging from apartheid, as Mandela is just emerging from 27 years in prison, and South Africa needs something to unite behind; I have never heard anything about Invictus being historically inaccurate in any important way. But I couldn't help wondering whether Mandela's concentration of rugby was more important than his substantial policies regarding reaction against former operators of apartheid. Morgan Freeman is never less than first rate, but Anthony Peckham's screenplay mentions that Mandela was so sensitive about his estrangement from his wife and children that he can't stand to have his family mentioned, and this reminded me to wonder about the crimes Winnie Mandela was accused of and why the children should have sided with her instead of with Mandela; the movie never suggests anything about these things. Freeman plays the public figure, which is justifiable but doesn't let us feel that we know the man, so our sympathies are a little weak.

And while I am no judge of athletic action, I found the rugby footage so uninteresting that I wondered whether Eastwood shouldn't have had a second-unit specialist handle the action sequences for him, the way William Wyler did on Ben-Hur. Matt Damon is all beefed up and does what he can with the coach, but it isn't clear what he did beyond a rah-rah speech or two. The story seems incomplete even on athletic terms. Maybe we should all read John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy; the movie is supposedly based on it, and it surely would tell us what happened. Invictus really doesn't.