Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ tries to do too much

“Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom” provides a different take on its subject than many of us are accustomed to: Nelson Mandela is no Martin Luther King Jr., and he was far more radical than even Malcolm X. If you’re under the impression that his ideas got him imprisoned for 25 years, think again: It was his bombs.

Directed without much imagination by Justin Chadwick, the film starring Idris Elba in the title role suffers from the stiffness of a history lesson: For an hour or so, as Mandela the country lad rises to urban lawyer defending unjustly accused blacks in Johannesburg, the film gets stuck in a cycle of love scenes and protests. Virtually all of the dialogue consists of platitudes and slogans, even in private conversations: It’s all “I am doing it for all of us,” “We have to live while we can,” “Together we have power.” The film is far too long, and, after “Lincoln” more filmmakers will decide it’s OK not to try to cover everything in an immense life.

A tighter film might have focused, for instance, on the question of when dissenters should take up arms. Instead, in a stodgy screenplay by William Nicholson, Mandela one day simply decides that violence is the only answer and begins a bombing campaign against the racist Boer rule of South Africa. That regime is rendered as a blob of nonspecific evil, but finding the human element in the hate — a face of evil like Amon Goeth in “Schindler’s List” or even the chain-gang boss in “Cool Hand Luke” — would have made “Long Walk” more of a drama and less of a textbook.

Nor is Elba the right choice. His boxer’s physique is wrong, he’s far too old to play the crusader at 24 and too young to play him after his prison sentence. Nor can Elba capture Mandela’s spellbinding signature trait — that twinkly, innocent smile.

Still, the film is a useful look at important history, and in the second half it grows intriguingly tangled. A movement arises to free Mandela, but he declines an offer to walk out of prison (on condition that he renounce violence). Instead, Mandela demands nothing less than full equality for blacks, but even as the apartheid state begins to fear his importance (moving him into house arrest in a gorgeous villa on a hill), both sides find there is no escape from the erupting hell of 1990s South Africa.

Gradually, the key relationship of the film emerges: Mandela’s second wife, Winnie (a chilling Naomie Harris), is herself imprisoned, endures a lengthy stay in solitary confinement and emerges as a more radical figure than her husband.

Nelson forswears vengeance against white tyranny, but meanwhile Winnie is putting on combat fatigues and denouncing traitors. White supremacy dies out — nicely rendered in an unexpected friendship between Nelson and a white prison guard — but now blacks are attacking other blacks in the townships.

It’s too bad that the negotiations that ended apartheid and changed a nation come in so late. They inspire scenes that are more nuanced and thought-provoking than the film’s earlier, blunt presentations of injustice. Ringing speeches and bombings may be cinematic, but Mandela’s real life’s work came when he set about stopping the cycle of agony in South Africa.