Chadwick's movie shows him cheating on his first wife, neglecting his infant son and smoking like a chimney. He's a militant firebrand, the scourge of the state. It is during these moments that the film catches Mandela at his most knotty and raw. Outraged by the death of a drunk in police custody, he becomes involved in the ANC struggle against apartheid, burning his identity papers and shuttling between safe houses. Mandela (superbly embodied by the British actor Idris Elba) starts out as a wily young lawyer, audaciously defending a domestic servant accused of stealing her mistress's knickers. To misquote John Huston in Chinatown, "Ugly buildings, whores and Nelson Mandela – they all get respectable if they last long enough."Īdapted by William Nicholson from Mandela's 1995 autobiography, the film is at its best in its urgent opening half, when it charts the political education of its subject against a backdrop of hysterical institutionalised racism. But Long Walk to Freedom, although made with rigour and intelligence, is largely content to print the legend and tidy the tensions. At various stages of his turbulent life, Mandela inspired fear and loathing, adoration and awe. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is a conservative film about a radical man, a movie so bowed down by the weight of responsibility that it occasionally trudges when you wish it would dance.
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