Ruggers for Peace

Eastwood’s understated Invictus illustrates the path to political reconciliation

(Dec. 17, 2009) Previews

Opening Friday, Dec. 18, is the much-ballyhooed Avatar (3-D & conventional), from “king of the world” James Cameron. In the distant future on distant planet Pandora where the natives are tall, blue and have tails, a group of humans plan an invasion to secure a valuable mineral. Interspecies love causes complications. With Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Michelle Rodriguez. Rated PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking. 162m. At the Broadway (also 3-D), Fortuna (3-D), Mill Creek and Minor.

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The romantic dramedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? features Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker as successful Manhattanites in a failing marriage. But when they witness a murder, the FBI sends them of to Nowhere, Wyo., for their protection. Will love re-bloom? Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and momentary violence. 103m. At the Broadway and Mill Creek.

Opening Dec. 23 is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, and on Christmas Day Sherlock Holmes, It’s Complicated and Up in the Air. See next Journal for previews.

For reader Suzanne Crothers (see letters last week) and others, The Road, A Single Man, Precious, The Lovely Bones and others will open sometime in January.

Reviews

INVICTUS: Early in Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) indicates that during his 27 years of imprisonment he learned his captors’ language and culture. Among the texts he cherished during his long incarceration was the poem by English Victorian poet William Ernest Henley that gives the film its title. His poem “Invictus,” written from his hospital bed following the amputation of his diseased foot, concludes with the famous couplet “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”

Whether this sentiment is absurdly self-deceptive or a ringing affirmation of individual triumph over seemingly random fate is up to individual readers, but in the film Mandela gives the poem to rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) as a way of motivating him at the beginning of 1995 Rugby World Cup, which is being hosted by South Africa. For Mandela, the poem and the rugby match were part of a calculated if risky strategy to bring his deeply divided country together as he embarked on his presidency.

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