South African President Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, centre) believes he can bring his fractured country together through a common love of rugby in Invictus. (Warner Bros.)

Can we all agree that Morgan Freeman is the perfect actor to play Nelson Mandela? He’s got the grizzled curls and the laugh lines of the beloved South African leader, as well as the authority and aura of sagacity.

Invictus is a stirring sports drama with a little politics on the side. But if the movie is largely superficial, it never feels dishonest.

In Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s uplifting new film about a defining moment in Mandela’s presidency, Freeman even pulls off a fairly credible vocal imitation, truncating his warm Southern drawl into Mandela’s precise style of English.

Like Helen Mirren with Queen Elizabeth II and Frank Langella with Richard Nixon, Freeman doesn’t impersonate his famous subject so much as capture his essence. He moves with the stiffness of a former convict who spent years breaking rocks on Robben Island. He talks with the careful emphasis of a man who has spent a long time thinking about what he has to say. You only wish Anthony Peckham’s dialogue didn’t have him speaking almost entirely in aphorisms.

Peckham’s screenplay is based on John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Carlin wrote it with a movie in mind and, indeed, it proves a pithy – if simple – way of encapsulating Mandela’s courageous, controversial policy of reconciliation. In Eastwood’s hands, it’s even simpler – a stirring sports drama with a little politics on the side. But if the movie is largely superficial, it never feels dishonest.

Eastwood opens with a shot that neatly summarizes what Mandela faced in 1990, when he was finally released by the de Klerk government after 27 years in prison. The motorcade carrying him to freedom drives down a road that divides a bunch of rich white lads practising rugby on a green pitch and their poor black counterparts playing soccer in a dusty field. The black kids cheer for “Madiba” (Mandela’s honorary family title), while the white boys’ coach refers to him derisively as “that terrorist” and offers a dire prediction for the future of South Africa. Clearly, “Madiba” has his work cut out for him if he’s going to unite the country’s white minority and black majority into his “rainbow nation.”

Once he becomes president in South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections, Mandela seizes on a perfect symbol of his intentions. He unexpectedly throws his support behind the Springboks, the white national rugby team — so despised by black South Africans that they attend matches just to root for the opponents. The Springboks are also a crap team. With South Africa set to host the World Cup of rugby in 1995, Mandela becomes invested in seeing that the Boks come up to scratch, in the hope they’ll inspire national pride.

To that end, the president invites Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), the team’s blond young captain, for tea and a pep talk. He gives Pienaar a copy of William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem Invictus (“Undefeated”), which became Mandela’s credo during his long years in prison. He also sends Pienaar and the Springboks into the black townships to coach rugby and do a little public relations. (It helps that the Boks have a token black player, the much-adored Chester Williams, played by an affable McNeil Hendricks.) Increasingly impressed by Mandela, Pienaar takes it upon himself to give the team a tour of Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz, where the now-president spent the bulk of his incarceration.

As the newly motivated Springboks begin fighting their way to the finals of the World Cup – climaxing in a nail-biting overtime game against New Zealand at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium – Freeman relinquishes the spotlight to Damon and the lads. There’s plenty of bone-crunching rugby action, including a gruelling match against Western Samoa played in the mud and rain. And, for a little added tension, there’s a subplot involving Mandela’s black and white security guards, who are as wary of each other as they are of the president’s safety.

Mandela (Morgan Freeman, left) inspires Springboks captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to lead his rugby team to glory in the 1995 World Cup. (Warner Bros.)

Eastwood has never been a subtle filmmaker, as last year’s Gran Torino reminded us. Here, he sabotages his noble intentions by falling into cinematic clichés. By the end, when jubilant blacks and whites are embracing one another in slo-mo while Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens’s gooey, Ebony and Ivory-type ballads drip from the soundtrack, the film has become exactly what those of us with low expectations thought it might be.

Before the feel-good finale, however, the picture does a good job of conveying the uneasy mood of South Africans in the years immediately following the abolition of apartheid. It also makes a point of humanizing the saintly Mandela. We’re reminded that he was separated from his second wife, Winnie, at the time, and there’s a confrontation with his angry adult daughter Zindzi (Bonnie Henna) that leaves Mandela, the smooth statesman, a sad and bewildered father.

The picture was shot on location in Johannesburg and Cape Town and, apart from Freeman and Damon, the fine cast is predominantly South African. Damon, perhaps realizing this is Freeman’s showcase, quietly underplays Pienaar. Last seen as a flabby chatterbox in The Informant!, Damon is quite the contrast here – muscled, taciturn, thoughtful. When he does speak, he gets the tricky Afrikaans accent right (at least to these inexpert ears).

This February marks the 20th anniversary of Mandela’s release from prison. If nothing else, Invictus poignantly reminds us that this man, persecuted for half a lifetime, entered the free world in a spirit of forgiveness. As we look back on a decade of wars and terrible acts fuelled by retribution, his alternative brand of politics seems more desirable than ever.

Invictus opens on Friday, Dec. 11.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.