In a time of reflection on the wonder that was Nelson Mandela, it's unfortunate that there is not a better movie about him.
Why do we make biopics? There’s no shortage of material out there about all supposed heroes and villains of history. Perhaps it’s the egotism of Hollywood, championing two ways of thought. One: something can ultimately be “legitimized” in the eyes of many as a movie. Dan Brown may have been loaded before, but it was the added exposure of a successful movie that turned The Da Vinci Code into a pop culture phenomenon. And two: there’s the race to be the single film about a certain topic in existence. Even dodgeball, a game played by millions, can get a “definitive” cinematic treatment courtesy of Ben Stiller. Thus enter Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom.
We’ve seen Nelson Mandela on film before, but it was either in an abstract sense, or focused on a specific period for the politician, like Morgan Freeman’s kindly portrayal in Invictus. Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom offers a more thorough meditation, which tries to show modern audiences that, yes, Mandela was once young.
The popular interpretation of Mandela has always been that of a benevolent, gray-haired man with excellent accented elocution in regards to his English. Without offending anyone (particularly the Mandela estate), Long Walk To Freedom emphasizes that he once used to fight and make love as well. Our pop cultural remembrance of Mandela is noble but, unfairly, square. It’s easy to remember that people who change the world are rarely squares themselves. Our first encounters with Mandela in Justin Chadwick’s new film emphasizes this man was a volcano, one who simply learned to control the flow of lava over the years.
Much of that comes from Idris Elba’s powerful performance. Elba is a beautiful man, with smoothly contoured skin and a soft smile. While he looks almost nothing like Mandela, his speech patterns are similar, and his thick-barreled chest helps spotlight the skinnier Mandela’s similarly broad shoulders. Elba makes Mandela into a bit of a sex symbol in early scenes – when his shirt comes off, it’s something of a revelation – but it fits with the idea of establishing that he was an outlaw, powering the African National Congress to take aggressive action against the government’s uneven policies and thinly-justified racism.
Mandela’s story is massive and unwieldy, and it’s unfortunate that the film basically hop-scotches around pivotal moments. His courtship of wife Winnie (Naomie Harris) is illuminating in the way romance and politics dovetail, as his seduction essentially radicalizes her, first towards his cause and later to a dangerous, more transgressive sort of violence. That relationship was covered ineffectually in this year’s Winnie but here, in Elba and Harris, you have two forceful, intense actors who could have carried that subplot into its own fiery film. Pity that Winnie’s anger eventually takes a backseat to Nelson’s more measured, respectful tone.
The picture barely has any time with the duo before Nelson ends up in prison, and the film feels hamstrung as a result. Long Walk To Freedom delicately observes Mandela’s subtle egotism as he walks into every room chanting his own call-and-response with followers. But when he ends up in his cell, he unleashes the call again, only to be met with silence. The loss on his face is almost nearly a relaxed smile, as if he’s partly relieved to be away from a country’s social upheaval for just one moment, while also noting his sudden impotence. As his time behind bars stretches through decades, he learns to find small victories within the margins, like a lessening tension between himself and his racist guards, or the dissipation of the arbitrary racism that puts white prisoners in long pants and blacks in shorts.
Unfortunately, aside from brief moments with Winnie, the movie doesn’t show what’s going on while Mandela is imprisoned. The soft-shoe approach towards the politics of the era is cowardly simplistic, assuming we’ll be satiated, as an audience, with Elba’s dulcet accent and kind eyes. What the ANC really want, and what the government is willing to yield, remains opaque. Frustratingly, when Mandela is released to negotiate peace with the government on behalf of the people, it feels like the movie is dancing around actually mentioning what divides the white and the black. This is probably best for the teachers who wish to spend a week’s time showing the 146 minute movie to classes, as it gives them very specific topics to teach afterwards, but for a full-length film, it feels inadequate.
By the time Mandela leaves prison, the world around him doesn’t even seem all that changed. More peaceful, perhaps, but that seems like a cheat by director Justin Chadwick, who tends to crowd the screen with child extras to emphasize a tranquil moment (and shoot them when he needs a bit of drama). Chadwick seems to relish the tensions amongst political families: when one of Mandela’s daughters visits him in prison and is instructed to avoid discussing politics in lieu of family topics, she snaps about how her family is based on politics, an obvious but meaningful move. What he doesn’t seem to understand is the idea of racism not always emerging from the same place. Many felt that the black citizens were inferior, but Chadwick seems to believe this was the prevailing notion. In fact, most who acted towards a cause that advocated racism did so because of money, families, and misplaced jingoistic pride; there are odious, upsetting reasons, but there are also human reasons that while still indefensible are worth illustrating. Not in this film.
When Mandela is finally running for office, the film has snowballed enough biopic checkpoints that it only needs to roll down the hill. Perhaps this is to distract from Elba’s elderly makeup, which sometimes has him looking like Sidney Poitier, and other times like The Toxic Avenger. There was a film to be made here for Mandela fans who only want the euphoria and intensity of the man captured for posterity, context be damned. The attempt instead was to make a broad, commercial picture, one that tried to present that aura for non-Mandela followers while merely half-heartedly committing to a milieu. Too glossy for Mandela purists, and too undercooked for the curious, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom probably should have stopped somewhere and asked for directions.
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