Starring: Idris Elbar, Naomie Harris, Terry Pheto
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 141 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2014
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Nelson Mandela was one of the most significant personalities of the 20th century. His life, and especially his endurance, if they were the subject of fiction, might seem exaggerated. But his story was well known all over the world, finally written by Mandela himself in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Now screenwriter, William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Nell, Les Miserables, Everest) has adapted the autobiography for the screen, a difficult task in compressing 94 years of life into 2½ hours screen time. It is clearly the material for a television mini-series. However, audiences will be pleased to have this cinema biography available.
The film is in the traditional biopic style, a fairly straightforward presentation of Mandela’s life. It follows his life chronologically, with some alerting sequences when he was a boy, his family, initiation ceremonies in the 1920s. We also see something of his early professional life as a lawyer, an excellent scene which sets a tone for the film where a black woman is accused of stealing a white woman’s lingerie, the woman in high dudgeon at being questioned by a black man who effectively wins the case for the accused, not without some humour. But, at this stage he is not politically active though sought after by the African National Council.
Injustices are dramatised effectively, and the humiliating treatment by the white population. With the legislation for apartheid in 1948, Mandela, who had married and had a family, opts for protest, leaving his wife and family, and becoming involved politically. He becomes increasingly radicalised, showing his abilities in leadership. As is well-known, after the failure of protest, he opts for some sabotage activity, shown briefly in the film, and he and his comrades are arrested, tried, and, to avoid making them martyrs, the judge sentences them to life imprisonment.
Many audiences will be aware of this part of Mandela’s life but it is interesting for it to be fleshed out, however briefly. It was at this time that he encountered Winnie whom he married. The group is sentenced to Robben Island, off the coast at Cape Town.
Again, audiences will know something of the 18 years he spent on Robben Island and the further nine years in prison on the mainland. But, it is dramatic to see the island, the cells of the prisoners, the courtyard where they worked, the quarry where they slaved, and, again, the humiliating treatment by the warden and the brutality of most of the guards.
For those interested in Mandela’s influence on South African politics, the film shows the discussions with the white politicians, with President De Klerk, the combination of shrewdness and practical idealism that marked Mandela’s ability to change South Africa. Ffter his release, there were riots and killings of traitors amongst the black Africans (shown graphically). But, in showing the broadcast where he spoke plainly, offered leadership, explaining that fighting the whites was a war that could not be one, we see him as the elder statesman, stressing peace. His final words in the film are about people not being born haters, their having to learn that, but that human beings are born with the capacity to love.
Idris Elba is able to capture the manner and the speech patterns of Mandela. Perhaps he is made to look too old before his time and audiences may focus on the make-up for the older Mandela, a bit too obvious. But this does not detract from the performance and the communication of the spirit of Mandela.
While the story of the man himself is familiar, and he is seen, not perfect, as strong, even with touches of heroic leadership, from his early years, it is the story of Winnie that is dramatically effective in the sense that she has to move from a devoted young woman and wife, mother of Mandela’s children, to a woman who is arrested, tortured, kept in solitary confinement 17 months, who becomes a leader, ever more embittered, alienated from her husband’s non-violent approach, becoming actively militant, even to military uniform, separating herself from her husband’s way of achievement, and their personal separation and divorce. Which is a sad, openly public, comment on the complexities of the anti-apartheid movement and the walk to Freedom.
Morgan Freeman made a great impression as Mandala in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. He was played by Denis Haysbert in a little seen film of 2009, Goodbye Bafana), a drama of Mandela’s final prison years and his emergence on the world scene with a focus on the sympathetic guard, played by Joseph Fiennes, who is also dramatised significantly in this film. Other portrayals of interest include a 1987 biopic (worth looking at in retrospect) with Danny Glover and in two films about Winnie Mandela.
Long Walk to Freedom ends in 1994, Mandela is elected President, confounding the expectations of both black and white South Africans, unthinkable six years earlier when the discussions about his release began.
This is a worthy film, and an opportunity for audiences to obtain more knowledge about Mandela, about apartheid, about South African politics, and the extraordinary phenomenon that was Nelson Mandela himself.
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