Invictus (2009)

Invictus is a rare movie that is wondrously more than the sum of its parts. You'd expect something directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon to be good, even great. Film starts rolling, and nothing spectacular happens. Every moment, every frame, every action feels obvious. Good for Freeman and Damon on the accents -- South African accents are notoriously tricky -- and that's about it, you start to think.

But much like Nelson Mandela's gamble that a symbolic victory could be just as valuable in healing his fractured nation as political policy, Eastwood's gamble on telling the story so straight it could slide into boring any second manages a rousing pay off.

Set in 1995, when Mandela apparently up and decided that winning the rugby World Cup would be great for South Africa even if their team was terrible, he called up Francois Pienaar and gave him just that job. And then they do. I really couldn't tell you how: they get a new coach who ensures that even if they're not the best team in the league they will surely be the fittest, but there's no indication that they develop a bunch of great new plays or become better at their positions. They just . . . try really hard? I don't know. I didn't even realize that they were playing the final match until after it was over.

Even so, it's nearly impossible not to be drawn in. It's not an underdog story so much as a story about people whose belief is so strong it can give the rest of us hope. Despite the rote filmmaking, that's enough to make the movie soar. B