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 first wife. And this is Mandela’s achievement: he is humanised for us, and this story is more powerful and moving because of it.

Idris Elba had to be solid in the title role, and he is. He illustrates a complex man of weakness and strength, one who could marshal violence in defence of his principles, yet was wise enough to make peace with sworn foes. Through him we see Mandela, just a little, from the inside out. Winnie Mandela made almost as many headlines as Mandela himself, and Naomie Harris nearly upstages Elba here as his second wife. It’s a riveting performance – her love for Mandela is as tangible as her anger and grief at the film’s climax.

It’s a shame that the script isn’t quite the equal of the cast. The exchanges between Mandela and his ANC deputies feel like earnest Sunday sermons. The film is also about 15 minutes too long. But the sincere performances and Director Chadwick’s sure hand with intimate character moments lift this out of the mundane.

There are a few unanswered questions and in time history may judge Nelson Mandela’s life differently, so I’m still waiting for the definitive documentary. But go to Mandela, be moved and know why he mattered to his people. And to history.

7.5/10

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