The young Mandela enjoys a traditional tribal upbringing in rural Xhosa before settling down to life as a firebrand lawyer. It doesn’t take long beside the inequities of South Africa’s apartheid system serve to radicalise Mandela (Idris Elba). The movie goes on to give a clear, strong narrative of Mandela's life, showing the burly young trial lawyer and amateur boxer joining the ANC to fight apartheid and police brutality, getting radicalised by the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, passionately leading an armed struggle and then once in prison transforming his anguish and rage into a Zen mastery of exile. He disarms his guards with a politician's knack of remembering their children's names and birthdays. His very retreat from the world gradually feeds his prestige and once free he is able to bring off a remarkable new metamorphosis into South African president and inspirational world leader.
Idris Elba conveys as much as any actor could of the enigma of Mandela's long experience in prison: it is a performance of sensitivity and force: his impersonation of the walking, talking Mandela is sharply observed, though it isn't just mimicry, and Naomie Harris is very good as Winnie, who (mostly) outside prison did not have the luxury of saintly inactivity and had to do what she saw as the dirty work of getting violent with the ANC's enemies and also with those traitors on her own team. It is a thoroughly well-managed movie, although it sees events purely in South African terms: it steers clear, for example, of the fact that US intelligence forces helped the 1960s South African government to arrest Mandela in 1962 and a lot of the out-of-prison activities that were going on--but the central character is Mandela himself, and it fulfills that mission nicely, and it came out just before Mandela's death. A fair and fitting tribute to a remarkable man.
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