Review: ‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’
Biographical films are, I think, a tough sell. After all, if you want to understand the history of a great man’s life and works why not rent a documentary? A 2-hour dramatisation will always risk glossing over the facts and cheapening its subject. But movies, like any drama, aren’t really about facts: they’re about emotions and feelings. The best documentaries (I’m thinking of When we were Kings) bring real heart and warmth to their subject, but a good biopic can take us beyond the details to help us feel a little of what the subject felt, and help us know why. And in this, Mandela succeeds. It’s not perfect but it’s heartfelt and genuine. Like the man himself, perhaps. The film begins and ends with Nelson Mandela’s dream – a simple life well lived, surrounded by all the people he loved. That the dream has changed by the end suggests that this was possibly not the life he imagined. We follow him from his childhood village where his drive and aspirations were perhaps shaped, through his early life as a lawyer in 1940s Johannesburg, his rise through the ranks of the ANC, and to the violence against the apartheid regime that lead to his incarceration for 27 years. This early Mandela is not the deific figure of modern popular imagination: he’s ambitious, he smokes and drinks, he fails his...
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