You know how yesterday I was talking about Serious Drama as comfort food? And how I said that despite enjoying the genre’s dominant clichés, there are still things I can’t handle?

Well… it looks like Invictus will be a great example of comfort food that doesn’t comfort me. Watch the trailer, and let me know what you think…

The Movie: Invictus (opening December 11)

The Buzz: Clint Eastwood directs a movie about Nelson Mandela uniting a divided South Africa through the miracle of sports. Morgran “Voice of God” Freeman plays Mandela, and for good measure, Matt Damon gets thrown in as a white South African rugby player who helps lead his team to the World Cup. In an unprecedented move, the Academy, while weeping, announced yesterday that it would preemptively nominate the film and everyone in it for an Academy Award.

The Trailer:

The Review:

This movie is based on the actual story of how South Africa’s unexpected win at the 1995 Rugby World Cup created a sense of unified pride among the nation’s white and black populations. Standing behind this pride was Nelson Mandela, who had recently been elected president of his nation after serving twenty-seven years in prison for fighting apartheid. He correctly saw the World Cup as a bridge for a country that had long been divided by difference.

And… damn. That’s amazing. In a brilliant New Yorker story about shamefully mistreated South African athlete Caster Semenya, Ariel Levy sums up the impact of the 1995 World Cup as follows:

Sports have played an important role in modern South African history. A crucial part of the African National Congress’s strategy to end apartheid during “the struggle,” as everyone calls it, was to secure international condemnation of South Africa’s government through boycotts and the banning of South African athletes from all international competitions. Conversely, during the 1995 rugby World Cup Nelson Mandela managed to unite the entire country behind the Springboks, the South African team, which had been a hated symbol of Afrikaner white supremacism. It was pivotal to his success in avoiding civil war and in establishing a new sense of national solidarity. Sports are “more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers,” Mandela said. “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has.”

In other words, this tale is already inspiring, so you know what it doesn’t need? Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood and his penchant for mawkish strings,  his tendency to reduce complex issues to cheap sentiment, and his eagerness to push Morgan Freeman even further into the land of Unimpeachable Dignity.

I’m already feeling crushed by the weight of this movie’s joyless self-importance. I mean, Eastwood made Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River into shallow moral treatises, and they were about everyday folks. When his subject is a world leader, I assume we’re going to get countless shots of Freeman, half-cloaked in shadow, gazing out of an office window while the reflection of a tattered South African flag flutters over his face. Or hell, maybe it’ll be an American flag.

I’m so put off by Eastwood’s lily-gilding that a few years ago, I refused to see Letters from Iwo Jima, even though it got a Best Picture nomination. That’s a big deal for me, since I’ve been to an actual movie theatre to see every Best Picture nominee since 1996.  But even now, the thought of Eastwood continuing America’s misty-eyed love affair with The Greatest Generation gives me chills.

I can only imagine I’ll have the same response to his treatment of apartheid.