Who says leadership doesn't matter? I bet no one who has seen "Invictus,'' the new Clint-Eastwood-directed movie we saw last night about rugby and the end of apartheid in South Africa.
The leader here is Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), the then-newly elected South African president who decides that championing the national rugby team could be an important tool in healing his country's profound racial divide. He hatches an improbable alliance with the captain of the team (Matt Damon), which makes a surprising run to the World Cup championship game in 1995 against New Zealand. (Guess who wins?)
Freeman carries the movie, capturing Mandela's familiar clipped speech and physical gestures perfectly.
Mandela is such a transcendent figure because while he was imprisoned for 27 years by the white-supremacist apartheid regime, he emerged from prison to be elected president with an agenda of racial conciliation rather than hate.
One reviewer described the film as a "spare, plain-spoken lesson about the brutality of force, the foolishness of revenge and the surprising power of grace.''
Certainly in this holiday season especially those lessons are all worth taking to heart.
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