Rugby liberates the soul?

The first non-combat movie about Vietnam was “The Boys in Company C,” a ridiculous film about Marines playing soccer to survive the war. It was a flop.

But other movies came along later that explored the American adventure in Southeast Asia with considerably more success.

Now comes the first movie to deal with a subject of equal importance, South Africa after the era of Apartheid. And this one turns out to be about rugby.

“Invictus” isn’t as painful as “The Boys in Company C,” of course -- the people who made it could pile up their Oscars like beer cans. And several scenes have a strong emotional resonance. It is just that the rest of the movie is pure blather.

Morgan Freeman stars as Nelson Mandela, one of the saints of the last century. It is 1994 and Mandela has just taken office as president of South Africa after spending 27 years in a tiny jail cell (which is shown to us, fascinatingly but gratuitously). Mandela’s first order of business in his mind is to unite a deeply divided country.

With some justification, blacks and whites fear and hate each other (no mention is made in the movie of coloreds and Asians, the country’s other two formerly official groups). Mandela needs something the entire population can get behind, and he decides the perfect unifying force is rugby. With the Rugby World Cup scheduled to be played in Johannesburg the following year, the timing is perfect.

All Mandela needs is to get the almost entirely white national team behind him, and then the country behind the almost entirely white national team. So he elicits the help of the team captain, played by Matt Damon.

Even if you know nothing about rugby -- and that’s a pretty good bet -- you already know what is going to happen in this film. So the question becomes: How well is it told?

Clint Eastwood behind the camera is a good start, and on a relatively regular basis his sense of humanity shines through. But he often cannot cut through the simplistic sentiment and syrupy script by Anthony Peckham. Working from a book by John Carlin, Peckham is unable to meet the challenge of keeping Mandela a man. He yields to the temptation of putting Grand and Eloquent and Frankly Overstated sentiments in his mouth.

“Forgiveness liberates the soul. It eliminates fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon,” Mandela utters casually. When asked about the health of his family, he soberly says, “I have a very large family. Forty-two million.”

This isn’t a dramatization, it is hagiography. And the man is still alive.

It’s all a bit much for a movie that turns out to be about rugby. And although Eastwood gets some of the dramatic scenes right, he misses with the rugby. We have no sense of the progress of most of the games as they are played, and only a little of the final game. And the rugby action we see looks a bit restrained and tentative. Americans who are not interested in the sport will find their minds unchanged after watching the film.

A large number of excellent movies have been made about Apartheid, from “A World Apart” to this year’s “District 9.” And excellent movies will be made about the transition to majority rule. But “Invictus” doesn’t quite do it.

It comes across as a volume of “Post-Apartheid South Africa for Dummies.”