Next week sees the release of Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, a parable of post-apartheid South Africa in which the South African National Rugby Union team and the newly anointed President Nelson Mandela join together in the name of sport to embrace a new, shared and unified nation.
This is undeniably inspiring subject-matter. Nelson Mandela’s placed his entire political capital in his allegiance to the Sprinkboks, a traditionally Boar institution that had been regarded as an embodiment of malicious colonial attitudes. By wearing the Boks jersey on the pitch with captain Francois Pienaar (played here by Matt Damon) after South Africa triumphed in the final of the 1995 World Cup, Mandela was casting all the recriminations and injustices of the past aside.
The first American film to overtly portray Nelson Mandela (who is portrayed, inevitably, by Morgan Freeman), Eastwood is at pains to recognise how he was imprisoned for over 27-years on Robben Island after being charged with conspiracy and sabotage and condemned as a terrorist. Less than a generation later, South Africa now has its fourth successive black President, and the racial quota that caused such consternation in the national sporting teams has now been removed. With luck, the sight of 32 nations from across the globe chasing a football around the playing fields of Johannesburg and Cape Town will serve as another reminder of the nation’s continuing modernity.
But despite the transformation laws introduced in 1994, both the national cricket and rugby teams are still disproportionately dominated by white players. After Makhaya Ntini’s recent milestone of 100 tests for the South Africa Cricket team, he was dropped in favour of two white debutant seamers. With the exception of batsmen Ashwell Prince and cape-coloured JP Duminy, there are now no black faces in South African national cricket. In rugby, Bryan Habana and JP Pietersen were the only black players fielded in the 2007 Rugby World Cup final, in comparison to one player (Chester Williams) taking to the pitch in 1995.
Already this year, we have seen machine-gun wielding terrorists attacking Togo’s national football team at the African Cup of Nations, seemingly to make some sort of statement about the independence of Cabinda. In response, The South African Football Association and FIFA have been forced to release a series of statements reassuring the world about security prior to this summer’s Football World Cup. And that’s just the problems of the national sports teams. As the setting of Neil Blomkamp’s recent film District 9 illustrated, as have South African films like Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, Mark Dornford-May’s Son of Man and John Boorman’s In My Country, South Africa is still beset by social disunity and racial fragmentation, where crime and poverty are rife.
It is here that Eastwood meets his challenge. Eastwood is adept at making muscular films in which big topics are explored without a populist ethos ever being compromised. Gran Torino, whilst big and brash, offered a suprisingly nuanced illustration of urban decay, and few modern films rival Million Dollar Baby for its depiction of faith and fatherhood in middle America. Few films have drawn a soldier’s experience of returning home as well as Flags of Our Fathers, whereas Changeling can be regarded as an extension of the classic women’s films of the Golden era.
It remains to be seen how Invictus fits into Eastwood’s canon, but it is clear that by creating a parable about the unifying power of sport, Eastwood has also inherently made a very political film. But Invictus does not possess a unique message. It is merely a modern retelling of a sentiment expressed cinematically on numerous occasions and one that has been existent as far back as the Ancient Olympics Games when ekecheiria (a truce between any warring factions) was observed throughout.
Steven Spielberg’s didactic but worthy film Munich, in which a group of Israeli hit-men become consumed within an interminable cycle of violence, gestates from a sporting crisis; the group are hired to avenge the death of a group of Israeli athletes murdered by Islamic terrorists at the Munich games of 1972. Michael Mann’s Ali and, in its own brilliant way, Jon Turtletaub’s Cool Runnings both use sport as a launch-pad to overtly discuss the black experience. Ali spans over a decade in the boxer’s life, and the film is as much about the civil rights movement and Ali’s opposition to the Vietnamese war as it is about taking down George Foreman and Joe Frazier. Cool Runnings is about a bunch of Jamaicans entering the Winter Olympics with a bobsleigh team. Enough said.
There’s a beautiful scene in All Quiet On the Western Front, the 1930 depiction of the front line that revealed for the first time the suffering of the German army to a Western audience. The German soldiers, each of whom has been brutalised by the war at some point in the film, are afforded the rare and brief luxury of R and R far away from the front line and its corrosively omnipresent threat of enemy shell fire.
Cinematically, there is little that makes this scene distinctive, but it is notable for the utopic sense of calm that pervades it. In a field teaming with soldiers, the main protagonists lay sprawled on the grass under a single tree that shades them from the beating sun. To paraphrase one of the soldiers, he asks why each of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers cannot return home to their families, leaving the Kaiser and the ruling elites of the Allies to slug the rest of the war out on a roped-off section of field.
The word ‘sport’ itself has a dual meaning. It is defined in the conventional sense as, “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature.” But sport also has a more philosophical meaning, that of, “something or someone subject to the whims or vicissitudes of fate and circumstance.”
By reasserting this parable to the forefront of society’s collective conscience, Eastwood has provided a timely reminder of sport’s unifying potential. But beyond simply inspiring a sense of well-being, the real challenge lies in his ability to capture the duality of sport and its politics.
