Clint Eastwood is a great director, but he’s not exactly subtle. He can tell complex and nuanced stories, but even in his best films that side of things usually comes from the script and the performances: Eastwood points the camera, shoots what the actors say, then moves on without too much fuss. 

It’s this rock-steady touch that turns out to be Invictus’ saving grace, as while it’s possible to imagine plenty of other directors doing a better job of telling the story of how Nelson Mandela held South Africa together through the power of Rugby, it’s hard to think of one who would do a better job of keeping it firmly down-to-earth.

The story is pretty straight-forward and Eastwood treats it that way: after his win in South Africa’s first free elections, Mandela (Morgan Freeman) takes the reigns of a country on the edge of tearing itself apart. The whites are scared, the blacks want revenge, and the country needs to be stable if there’s to be any chance of bringing in the international investment it needs after decades of sanctions.

So when Mandela throws his support behind the Springboks – South Africa’s national rugby team – he surprises pretty much everyone. Not only are the Springboks seen as a symbol of white oppression, but they’re crap: if South Africa wasn’t hosting the 1995 World Cup they’d have no chance of even qualifying. But together with team captain Francois Pienaar (an ultra-Aryan-looking Matt Damon), they decide that if South Africa is to survive, it has to be united – and what better way to unite a country than behind a sports team that can win on the international stage?

As a director Eastwood is only as good as the material he’s working with and this has its fair share of clunky movie-of-the-week moments as it retells history step by plodding step. If you already know the story you’ll learn nothing new here, and with the film’s dramatic climax built entirely around who wins the final match if you already know the result you can duck out ten minutes early (presumably they figure no-one in the US would know the result of a non-US sporting event).

Where it works  - thanks in large part to a solid performance from Freeman – is in showing Mandela as the right man at the right time. He’s a hard-working politician pretty much like any other ninety percent of the time, and the film’s matter-of-fact style gets this across perfectly… so then when we do get to see that in his ability to forgive and unite there really is something special about him it hits home all the harder. Any parallels to the current US political situation are no doubt a total co-incidence.

This isn’t Eastwood’s finest hour (there’s a song on the soundtrack about being “colourblind” that is one of the worst ever written), but tales of optimism and hope don’t have to be subtle.

The message here might be blunt, but Invictus (the film gets its title from a poem Mandela memorized in prison) gets it across just fine.

Invictus opens in cinemas on Thursday, January 21, 2010.
You can view the Invictus movie trailer here on TheVine.