Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Elba is good as the young Mandela but really hams it up as the old one. Script has no red string and Chadwick is totally lost as the director.

Stringer Bell does his best but is wrapped in way to much melodrama. I am still to watch a really good Mandela film...

Unacceptable. That it compresses 60 years into 2.5 hours and simplifies matters is fair. That it hints at the complexity of Mandela's character but ignores it in favor of a hagiographic approach is not. William Nicholson's script so rarely reaches below the surface that the occasional attempts to do so are off-putting. Idris Elba gives it his all, and the makeup really does make him look like Mandela, but to no great avail. Naomie Harris (as Winnie) has even less to do. Solidly produced, though.

I'm usually not wild about biopics, and this one is pretty ambitious. It's attempting to cover the span of pretty much his entire adult life, which was indeed a long and complicated one. Still, it's largely successful. It's a beautifully shot and well-paced movie. I would have liked a better treatment of his re-conversion to nonviolence, but I'm not actually certain that my own understanding of that is accurate, so I'll accept what's presented for what it is.

Somehow made one of the story of one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century kind of boring. Would probably have benefited from the slower pace and space to breathe of a mini-series.