Invictus Parent Guide

Any time athletes compete on the international stage, they feel the weight of their country’s hopes. But few teams feel that pressure more intensely than South Africa’s Springboks as they prepare to compete on home court in the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament. Their nation doesn’t just want a win; it needs a victory to unify a society torn apart by decades of apartheid (legally mandated racial segregation) and the ensuing fight to end white minority rule.

Springbok team captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) isn’t optimistic about his team’s chances. They haven’t been playing well and the mostly white players are unsettled by the election of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman). Furthermore, they are concerned that Mandela’s government will disband the team, long cherished by South Africa’s white Afrikaners and equally loathed by its black citizens. When Pienaar receives a phone call, inviting him to tea with Mandela, he is understandably anxious…

Invictus is the best kind of sports movie. Not only does it provide exciting sports footage that will please any rugby fan, but it has lessons that go far beyond the rugby field. This film is built on themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, empathy, and mercy. Most of those positive messages stem from Nelson Mandela himself. Despite having been imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid government for 27 years, Mandela sought to build a multiracial country; not a black state driven by revenge against Afrikaners. Having spent decades in prison learning his captors’ language and coming to understand their culture, he is convinced that South Africa’s future lies in having black and white citizens work together. And he believes that promoting the Springboks will reassure white Afrikaners of their place in the new South Africa, while also providing a new national symbol for the black majority. To reach this goal, Mandela is willing to spend some of his political capital.

Parents need have little concern over content issues in this film aside from some profanity and alcohol consumption. Instead, they can celebrate this depiction of people who are wholly dedicated to the good of their country and are willing to move beyond the evils of the past. Moral courage is all too rare a virtue, but it plays out across the big screen in this movie. And this trait is exemplified in a poem Mandela shares with Pienaar, and which explains much of his remarkable life: ”It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”