With a runtime that sits at a little over two hours, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom feels criminally short. As many of us know, Nelson Mandela was a great man who was chiselled by extremely complicated events that shaped him from the angry young head of a rogue party into an admirably pragmatic leader of an entire nation. When we watch a Mandela film, we wish to not only understand what made the great man tick, but how he grew into the leader that he was.
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A scene from movie, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom". – Courtesy Photo |
Unfortunately, director Justin Chadwick’s film fails to answer these questions with much satisfaction. To be fair, this biographical film is based on Mandela’s autobiography, and any shortcomings from the Long Walk to Freedom book will naturally translate over to a faithful cinematic translation. That being said, the film often feels like it is rushing through Mandela’s life like a soulless visual version of a wikiepdia entry on the South African leader.
One can especially feel this choppiness while Long Walk to Freedom examines Mandela’s earlier life, where he was a womanising adulterer who not only cheated on his wife, but at times also brushed dangerously close to being physically abusive. From here, Mandela, who joins the African National Congress, leads a series of attacks on the establishment who are treating black South Africans a little better than animals.
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A scene from movie, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom". – Courtesy Photo |
In spite of their significance, these events in the film feel quite underwhelming, lacking emotional impact. From the nature of the editing, my feeling is that these scenes were deliberately circumcised in the editing room. I can only speculate, but it is possible that Chadwick was pressured by the suits to cut down the film's length in order to cater to the film’s mass-market audience.
Fortunately, the acting on display is mostly good, especially from Idris Elba, who gained a cult following after his brilliant depiction of gangster Stringer Bell in HBO’s series, The Wire. Here, Elba does the best he can with the script that is handed to him. But, Elba’s performance is overshadowed by the frightfully bad makeup, which towards the end is supposed to transform him into the spitting image of the aged Mandela. Sadly, Elba looks less like the South African leader and more like a joker wearing a distasteful Mandela Halloween mask, which makes him look unnerving especially when standing next to the film's other characters who seem to have aged more naturally.
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A scene from movie, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom". – Courtesy Photo |
In terms of pacing, when Mandela ends up in jail, the film develops more organically, but the narrative and characterisation are clearly out of their depth. For any man spending most of his adult life in jail where he is cut off from society and suffers from the emotional trauma of losing on his relationship with his wife and children, there must be great reserves of mental toughness to cope with such a crippling event, yet Long Walk to Freedom isn’t always able to depict this. Moreover, aside from a handful of emotional sequences, the film fails to conjure enough empathy for the tragic figure, especially during his incarceration. Keep in mind, Justin Chadwick had the fortune of being in charge of some particularly powerful subject matter, and it takes some especially inept filmmaking to stumble so badly.
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A scene from movie, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom". – Courtesy Photo |
Perhaps a better filmmaker for Long Walk to Freedom would have been Spike Lee, whose tremendous Malcolm X (1992) stands as an example of fine biographical filmmaking. Of course, at 200 minutes, Malcolm X was almost an hour longer than Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Similarly, Gandhi (1982) was also forty-five minutes longer than this film. Heck, at 165 minutes, even The Dark Knight Rises was longer than the Long Walk to Freedom. Surely, the world’s greatest black leader deserves as much time on the silver screen as a fictional superhero with mommy and daddy issues.