Mandela - Long walk to freedom

Another Saturday evening another film.  Kept up my excellent record of cinema attendance last weekend with my third cinema trip of the year in less than 2 weeks.  I wanted to go and see 12 Years a Slave, but some of my friends were but off by the overly stressful nature of the material therein (I have since seen 12 Years a Slave - review later).  So we made a compromise and decided to watch the new Mandela biopic, starring Idris Elba as Nelson Mandela.  Idris Elba isn't exactly the first person I think that many people would have thought of as an ideal candidate to play Nelson Mandela.  Elba is most well-known as his role as Baltimore gangster Stringer Bell in the critically-lauded The Wire.  He has also played a number of 'hard men' in other TV and film.  Most of us think of Mandela as a kindly old man gently seeing South Africa through a period of peaceful transition, but as his recent death has forced many to recall, he was once a determined activist who took up arms to fight his oppressor.  By all accounts it seems that he was a big guy, who was a boxer and something of a lady's man in his youth.  Perhaps Elba isn't such a bad choice after all eh?

Mandela - Long walk to Freedom provides an astonishingly accurate overview of the life of Nelson Mandela, from his early activism through his incarceration, finishing with him becoming the president of the nation that once jailed him as a terrorist.  Despite being only just over 2 hours long, the film packs in a hell of a lot of modern South African history.  And though its attention to accuracy and neutral portrayals of events is to be lauded, the fact that so much is being crammed into such a small amount of celluloid means that sometimes events get a little brushed over.  This is one of the only bad thing I can think of to say about this film, a film in which Idris Elba puts himself firmly on the A list of actors on the world stage with his superb portrayal of Nelson Mandela.

Elba steps into the various stages of Mandela's life with ease.  In his early life he is bombastic, strong and vocal.  In prison he is reflective and stoic in his political views.  After his release he is wise and father-like to a nation.  Equally Naomie Harris does the same with her portrayal of the different stages of Winnie Mandela's life.  From the wide-eyed youngster who allows herself to be swept off her feet to the stern activist fostering the armed rebellion that forced the South African government's hand towards the end of the 1980s, she's outstanding.

Aside from the acting, the thing that the film does really well is to present the fight by ordinary South Africans against Apartheid as a complex struggle that had and continues to have factions within it with conflicting objectives and ideals.  It asks questions about that fight, and asks about what factors were really responsible for causing change in South Africa.  Though history readily remembers Nelson Mandela's sacrifices and calls for peace after his release, history can sometimes be quick to forget the violence in the South African townships that precipitated his release.  Revolutionary change like happened in South Africa is never a matter of simple good versus evil.  Taken as either a historical documentary or straight film about a man who many consider a hero, Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom is excellent.