Nevertheless, the slavery story has been downplayed over the years -- with some recent exceptions, most notably continuing references in Stephen Spielberg's heroic paen to Lincoln=, and Quentin Tarantino's mocking Django Unchained that played to the desire for revenge and payback by the ancestors of the victims.
Django became a comic vehicle for laughing at oppressors even as Lincoln aspired to educate Americans about their preferably forgotten tragic past.
Django also plays to the simmering anger and often silent discontent among black Americans who have come to realize how little our first black president has done for their community, plagued as it is by high levels of unemployment, massive foreclosures and pervasive downward mobility.
Now, late in the year, comes Mandela Long Walk to Freedom, a real-life majestic bio-pic that deals with the headier subject of liberation.
A South African production with powerful American and European distribution, it captures the sweep of Nelson Mandela's long life from his childhood days in a rural tribal area to his triumph in the presidential election of l994. It deals openly with some of his flaws and role in an armed struggle denounced as terrorism at the time.
So far, most critics embrace it, especially Idris Elba's sterling performance as Mandela and Naomie Harris as Winnie, although some sneer at it for being "stolid" or "worthy," because it covers too much and deals with the political choices of Mandela and the ANC..
In many ways, some of these critics seem to believe their duty is to insure that major movies don't stray from entertainment formulas and avoid serious issues. This is the kind of sniping that usually greets a film sympathetic to political movements; even this one has conformed to Hollywood narrative demands with a centerpiece portraying the ups and downs of the man South Africans called Madiba and his love affair with Winnie Mandela.
This is a film I know something about personally because I directed a multi-hour Making of, and Meaning of, documentary on the set. Some of my research and more than 100 recent interviews are also the basis of my new soon to be released book, Madiba AtoZ: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela (Seven Stories Press).
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