Review of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013) by Ray K — 02 Jan 2014

Even with the right actor in the person of the excellent and magnetic Idris Elba as Nelson Mandela, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" proves once again how hard it is to not only compress the life of an extraoardinary man into a film, but also to chronicle 50 years of a country's history in the same time period. Of course, it does not help when the movie's idea of epic is the occasional sweeping camera movement.

But by the end of "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom," I realized that like Nelson Mandela at Robben Island but on a much scaller scale that the movie was playing the long game. By starting with some heavy handed scenes of racist abuse, the movie does a fine job of not only charting the rate of racial progress in South Africa, but also Mandela's evolving philosophy, starting with his own awakening from being just a lawyer who feels that if he can keep his head down, he can be a success and live the good life.(The constant is his being absent from his family throughout.) That all changes when a friend is killed in police custody, and Mandela goes to work for the African National Congress(ANC), using methods of peaceful resistance that Gandhi first developed in South Africa, decades previously. When the peaceful protests are greeted with violence by the authorities, the ANC respond in kind.