Based on the late revolutionary’s autobiography, ‘Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom’ ought to have the warmth and calculated pragmatism of its apartheid-ending hero, Nelson Mandela (Idris Elba).
Instead, it’s the predictable result of Mandela’s entire 600-page memoir being shoehorned into a 130-minute run-time. It ends up a broad-stroked lumber through Mandela’s watershed moments that’s akin to an encyclopaedic checklist. But where even a reference book would have chapters and page design, this film is structurally scattershot and artless almost beyond repair.
We watch Mandela from his beginnings in small-town, sunlit Africa and through his early career as a lawyer in a Johannesburg rife with ‘Europeans only’ signs. It’s the kind of place where being an African resident who’s a little too drunk and a little too lacking in formal identification lends itself to police brutality.
This kind of apartheid segmentation and related spates of discomfiting gun violence drive Mandela to become a leading activist in the forthright African National Congress. His central involvement leaves him with a life imprisonment sentence in no less than 50 screen minutes.
In short, there’s a lot of ground left to cover, which sends the film’s pacing into an intractable overdrive.
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Thankfully, even an encyclopaedia would find room for detail in Mandela’s gruelling 27-year prison sentence, and the same goes for ‘Long Walk To Freedom’. Circumstances surrounding the solitary confinement of Mandela’s fierce wife, Minnie (Naromie Harris), and parental alienation of his children give room enough for Idris Elba to shade insight into his character’s quiet hardship. It’s terrific work considering this movie seems bent on showing only his character’s solemn dignity.
Naomie Harris is an even more magnetic screen presence, and she near single-handedly transcends the biopic’s telemovie blandness. Harris keeps a world of ferocity pent up behind her lips, then puts her every facial muscle into bellowing each syllable when it all comes jetting out. I’m not sure if ‘Long Walk To Freedom’ is deliberately about Winnie’s defiance as much as it is Nelson’s persistence, but by the time Harris has finished being this movie’s most frictional part, I was sure as hell convinced.
‘Long Walk To Freedom’ has good intentions and a strong sense of biographical duty, but it’s the kind of biopic that finds undue validation in the original U2 song its credits roll to. That song feels like a tribute to the movie itself more so than one to its hero. Likewise, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ is too much fanfare of Mandela’s tumultuous journey, and too little insight into the man behind it
