Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

Winnie Mandela biopic stumbles

Nelson Mandela’s failing health — and a more high-profile biopic on him starring Idris Elba due in November — may well be the reason that this uninspired hagiography on Mandela’s ex-wife is finally reaching US theaters, three years after it was shot in South Africa.

The very American Terrence Howard and Jennifer Hudson are better than you might expect as Nelson and Winnie Mandela, though the latter has a distractingly large number of colorful costume changes and both are encased in terrible makeup as their characters approach middle age.

A bigger problem, though, is the script co-written by director Darrell Roodt, which insistently views the struggle against apartheid through the Mandelas’ relationship, which endured through his 27 years of imprisonment.

Hudson’s best scenes come during Winnie’s much briefer jail stint, but even here there’s the consistent problem of presenting the South African racists (the normally reliable Elias Koteas plays the Mandelas’ chief antagonist) trying to break her down as buffoons.

“Winnie Mandela’’ really stumbles when it comes to depicting the couple’s painful separation, which the film suggests resulted more from politics than Winnie’s infidelity.

And the film totally bungles Winnie Mandela’s trial for human rights violations and complicity in the killing of a teenager who her thuggish bodyguards suspected was a police informer. These events tarnished her reputation as an activist, one of many complexities that get brushed aside in this too uncritical look at her life.