Conventional biopic lacks power to exploit uncanny timing of release
In its pursuit of content to fill its pages and airtime, the news media can seem tasteless, even ghoulish.
Case in point: As the world mourned Nelson Mandela, 95, and reporters and pundits struggled to assess the legacy of the South African freedom fighter, entertainment journalists wondered what the Dec. 5 death would mean for the box-office revenues and Oscar chances of “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” a biopic adapted from Mandela’s autobiography that coincidentally began its U.S. theatrical run the week of the anti-apartheid hero’s demise.
In an article headlined “A Macabre Assist for Weinstein’s ‘Mandela,’” The New York Times reported that the death could “give the film a boost on the Oscar trail” but also “complicate” the Weinstein Company’s promotional strategy. The story referenced — with something like grudging admiration — the movie’s “morbidly uncanny timing.”
Less than three weeks later, such considerations already seem irrelevant as well as tacky. A no-show in best-of-2013 year-end critics’ polls, “Mandela” — which opens in Memphis on Christmas Day — is not vivid, daring or passionate enough to exploit, for better or worse, the unexpected current-events context of its arrival. It is not an adequate tribute to South Africa’s first black president, nor is it a disgrace to his memory. It is a rather conventional and pious movie biography that misses the opportunity to be more — to use art and imagination to bring insight to a life history that otherwise might be better served with a straight documentary.
Scripted by William Nicholson, an old hand at historical subjects, both legitimate (“Elizabeth: The Golden Age”) and fanciful (“Gladiator”), and directed by Justin Chadwick (“The Other Boleyn Girl”), “Long Walk to Freedom” — the movie shares the title of Mandela’s 1995 memoir — is the more or less chronological story of a young boy with the royal blood of the Thembu clan who leaves rural South Africa for the city, to become a “native” lawyer, charismatic lady-charmer, African National Congress leader, revolutionary, prisoner and international hero in the struggle to end South Africa’s enforcement of apartheid, an institutionalized system of “total segregation” and “uncompromising white superiority.”
Mandela is played by Idris Elba, a powerful actor who here appears more stolid than strong, even if he does exude a Mandelaesque sense of moral authority. Naomie Harris, meanwhile, is Mandela’s wife, Winnie, and her on-screen transformation from helpmate to firebrand is more interesting than her husband’s steady and ultimately more effective resolve.
Winnie’s radicalization occurs while Nelson Mandela is inside the infamous Robben Island prison, serving a life sentence for sabotage. (The movie does not shy away showing Mandela participating in the bombing of apparently unoccupied power plants and government offices.) During this enforced absence from the world stage, Mandela becomes an international symbol of freedom and even a celebrity, and the movie might have profited if it had focused exclusively on this or some other dramatic period of his life, rather than illustrating highlights of his entire “long walk.”
The movie presents Mandela — who served 28 years before South African officials succumbed to international pressure and released him from prison — as the right man for the right time, a Martin Luther King-like figure of uncompromising convictions who nonetheless appreciated the give-and-take of political negotiation. “We cannot win a war, but we can win an election,” Mandela tells his impatient associates who favor a violent response to apartheid. Speaking to a white leader, he is more scolding: “You’ve always been afraid of us. It’s made you an unjust and brutal people.”
This brutishness is arguably underplayed, as if the filmmakers were wary of opening old wounds. The movie includes scenes of massacres and references to “necklacing” (the practice of setting fire to a tire placed around a victim’s neck), but “Long Walk to Freedom” — unlike “12 Years a Slave” — doesn’t go for the throat; as a result, it’s sometimes more dry than urgent.
Unsurprisingly, the film benefits from its African locations and distinctive period detail, especially when the action takes place in the impoverished townships or rural villages that are unlike the settings seen in American stories set in the same decades. Also novel is the South African jazz and pop that too infrequently enlivens the soundtrack. Finally, the end credits feature a new song by U2 that is just adequate enough to be nominated for an Academy Award.
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