Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom

There was a time back in the day when if you had an important story or biography to tell about a black person, the only way that it was getting any kind of run was on a made for tv movie. If you were lucky, something as important as Roots or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually got a mini series but these movies  were always filled with melodrama and overacting. It’s like that skit they used to run on SNL with Chris Rock and Sinbad, The Overacting Black Family; where every event was treated like it was setting Black people back 20 years. “What do you mean, we don’t have any milk for my cereal? We don’t ever have two things that match Mattie! Cereal no milk? Peanut no Jelly! Ham no burger!” Now I know I just compared Dr. King to Smokey from Friday and for that I am probably going to hell but that was the reality. Thankfully times have changed a bit and we have movies like Malcolm X, The Hurricane, and Invictus. And while Invictus was a solid movie, it really was just about Mandela forming a rugby team. I don’t mean to trivialize this action, ok maybe just a bit, but his life meant so much more than this. Thankfully Hollywood gave the green light to release a proper biography for one of the world’s most prominent civil rights leaders in Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom.

The movie starts out showing you a young Mandela who spends the majority of his time acting as the public defendant for the native Africans who are being treated unfairly or who are being falsely accused by the outsiders who are ruling their land. And right from the start you see the general disregard the “master race” has for them, even in the courtroom. But the movie makes it a point to not present Mandela as a perfect saint either. He was quite the womanizer early on in his life and this naturally caused a few issues for him. But after his friend is beaten to death by the cops for no apparent reason he decides to help start the ACN (African National Congress) to help bring equal rights and treatment to the natives. It shows how they started off as a peaceful organization but due to the lack of progress they were seeing especially after a slaughter that took place at a local plant, they then resorted to acts of terrorism to get their point across.

The movie takes you through his arrest and the awful conditions of his cell. It also shows you the plight that his wife Winnie had to go through as she was also harassed, tortured, and imprisoned for unjust reasons. This is what led to her deep hatred for the “master race” and is what ultimately led to hers and Nelson’s divorce. The entire time he was imprisoned, Mandela never lost his zeal for helping his people and he dedicated his entire life to their advancement.

What drives this movie and keeps it from being a tv movie of the week are the performances by Idris Elba and Naomi Harris. Idris’ natural cool instantly makes you want to forgive anything negative he does and also makes you want to follow him no matter where he is leading you. He nails the South African accent which is a testament to the hard work he did with his dialect and speech coach. And most importantly he stays away from the melodrama; he relies mainly on his facial expressions to convey the pain he goes through as he has to deal with the death of his mother and first son while he is still in prison. Harris is unbelievably convincing as the radical Winnie with her strong screen presence. I just wish they had thrown in a zombie or two for her to kill so she could yell “Jim! He’s infected!!!” (that’s a 28 Days Later reference in case you didn’t catch it).

It’s really hard to fit how important they were to the civil rights movement in South Africa in 2 ½ hours but the director did an awesome job at it. There are very few lulls in the movie and they don’t go light on any of the racism or violent acts that took place. I think this is an important movie that everyone needs to see and I give it a rating of FRESH!