When asked which actor he would have portray him in a film of his life, Nelson Mandela didn’t hesitate to nominate Morgan Freeman, who, in turn, has been struggling for years to bring the former South African President to the silver screen. With Invictus, based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, Freeman’s role of a lifetime has finally arrived, and he gives it his all. Although it occasionally feels like an amalgamation of his roles in The Shawshank Redemption and Deep Impact as a prisoner and president respectively, Freeman is by no means weak – on the contrary, his subsequent Oscar nod is well earned, with an admirably nuanced performance that skilfully captures the great man onscreen. As such, it’s a great shame to see Freeman so badly let down by a mawkishly sentimental and reductive slice of thinly concealed Oscar bait.

It starts promisingly enough: reconstructed news footage shows Mandela/Freeman being freed from prison and soon being elected as President, while his assistant (a convincing Adjoa Andoh) warns him of the urgent problems facing South Africa, including a crippled economy, poor healthcare and seething racial tensions. A more political filmmaker such as Oliver Stone may have leapt at the chance to draw out contemporary parallels with Obama, but instead the filmmakers chose a simpler and supposedly inoffensive route by concentrating on the 1995 South Africa Rugby World Cup. However, in doing so the film might manage to sidestep political controversy, but it is also resoundingly successful in offending the intelligence of its audience. Mandela effectively abandons all other presidential commitments in order to oversee victory for the Springboks – a team representative of apartheid – with the hope of easing the racial tensions threatening to engulf the country. Even without knowing the outcome of the World Cup, one can quite easily map out the film’s narrative trajectory – if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the film.

The execution of the film is not at fault here. Clint Eastwood has evolved into one of the most consistent and hardworking directors in Hollywood, and at 79 he shows no signs of slowing down. His direction here is confident and at times impressive, no more so than in the climactic Springbok/All Blacks showdown. Alongside this, Matt Damon provides quietly effective support as the Springbok captain, François Pienaar, as he neatly sidesteps the trap previously fallen into by Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond by producing a surprisingly convincing South African accent. Perhaps more importantly, Damon’s in fully-fledged beefcake mode here, bouncing back from his gut-heavy performance in Soderbergh’s The Informant! to show off a newly acquired rugby player physique. Unfortunately, his less impressive stature provides the film with some unintentional laughs, as, at 5’ 10’’, Damon is constantly dwarfed by his more authentic onscreen teammates.

However, despite the convincing performances and Eastwood’s sure-handed direction, the film’s painfully inept plot greatly overshadows the brief flashes of excellence. Within half an hour, its central message – rugby cures racism – is made clear, and the script then proceeds to crudely beat the audience over the head with this simplistic and sentimental mantra for a further hour and a half – most noticeable in the painful employment of a song entitled “Colourblind” prior to the climactic match. The moral complexities and sheer narrative subtlety that defined Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood’s previous collaborations (Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven – still Eastwood’s unsurpassed masterpiece) are entirely absent here, replaced instead with a clumsy feel-good conclusion courtesy of Anthony Peckham’s otherwise unremarkable script. The film casually concludes that racism was ended in South Africa on 24 June 1995, and offers no hint of the country’s future political and racial difficulties, let alone any criticism of Mandela himself. The skill with which this film was made and the talent of those who made it only serve to make its shortcomings all the more noticeable and frustrating. The quality of Freeman’s performance is wasted on a poor script, while Eastwood has shown elsewhere that he is a far more able and intelligent director than Invictus would have you believe.

2 stars

We all have a little of Alexander the Great in us. That same insistent flame that drove one Macedonian across half of Asia in search of new worlds to conquer burns in everyone. We are all capable of seeing the whole world about us as an artwork to be coveted, an enigma to be solved, a question to whose answer we could devote all of our life and energy. It is just that most of us often need to be reminded of what is out there.

And so I am standing in an elegant study in west London, swaying slightly from motion sickness. A moment later, a man enters with a glass of water and a smile. He has a face made for smiling with, and it’s infectious. Colin Thubron is a people person: he has made the infinite strangeness and charm of the human race his concern for five decades. In a lifetime of travel he has passed through some of the world’s most dramatic landscapes and most magnificent cities, but time and again his narratives will stop for the whims of a child or the hopes and dreams of a young man.

This is a man for whom the world is a perpetual adventure. He grew up travelling back and forth between Britain and North America in the footsteps of his father, a military attache. Life was a great kaleidoscope: ‘I had hardly seen a river larger than the Thames, and then I was in the eastern lake country of Canada. I just remember the great excitement of the sheer fact of moving.’ After an Eton education that bequeathed him a headful of poetry and history, he went straight into publishing, and wound up in Damascus at the age of twenty-two, speaking no Arabic and with ‘no real sense that I knew what was going on.’

‘I was fascinated by what I didn’t understand,’ he remembers. In his mind’s eye, he threads a dust-paved street near the Bab Sharqi in Damascus’ old city, and a half-open door flashes a glimpse of a basalt courtyard with a secret fountain, ‘set up to invite your curiosity.’ He has spent his life going through such doors. Four years later he published his first travel book, Mirror to Damascus, which he describes as ‘simply a work of love.’ Blending history, poetry and above all a sympathetic interest in ordinary people, it set the tone that would characterise much of his travel writing. It is a book that carries the impress of the city as a bed retains its lover’s form. Thubron is adamant that it should be the pure experience of travel that moulds writing, not any grand theory or romantic idealisation. ‘You are responsible to what is out there.’ His books, he says, write themselves after the journey: ‘you just bum along, have all these meetings, and that’s the book.’

He is never bored. ‘I always feel that I haven’t got enough: I’m always on the outside trying to get in. Even when you’re on a train, there’s the landscape to understand, you’re constantly trying to get it, or else there will be somebody to have a conversation with.’ Nor is he ever lonely. No two people are ever alike, and he has a universal empathy that could draw a novel out of the poorest specimen of humanity. ‘Superficially, everybody seems alike – it takes time for you to differentiate.’ But he always does: he invariably finds exactly what makes every person and place he encounters special.

The entire continent of Asia unfolds with a crackling of incense and laughter from his books. He was one of the first Englishmen in Siberia and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia after they opened up to foreigners, and he was there to catalogue the Six Day War from Beirut, and the Cultural Revolution from rural China. The latter seems to have been the single most moving experience in his career. There, in spite of all his objectivity, he was appalled at the ‘denial of individual conscience,’ the way that ideas became more important than people. ‘I didn’t attempt to deny a sense of cultural superiority.’ One day, however, he came across a Chinese professor who had suffered intensely, but told Thubron that he was astonished that such barbarity had happened in an ancient civilisation like China and not in the brutal world of Europe, the world of Hitler and Stalin. ‘I was brought up short,’ says Thubron ruefully. The travel writer always finds the telescope turned back upon the observer.

His most recent – and favourite – book, Shadow of the Silk Road, draws all of these themes together. He made a gruelling voyage from central China to Antalya in Turkey overland alone, including a leg through an Afghanistan sundered by war; and the lesson he learned from this book – and from his career – is clear. Man is a chaotic phenomenon, and you underestimate this at your peril. Never, ever mistake him for something simple and easily defined. Travel writing, he believes, is there to cross borders and smash up preconceptions. ‘One can theorise to the end of time, but individuals are irreducible. The subversion of theory is one of the great joys of travel writing,’ he tells me with a puckish grin.

Now in his eighth decade, he is writing a new book about his journey up the Karnali river in Nepal – the highest source of the Ganges – to Mt Kailas in Tibet, ‘the holiest mountain in the world, I suppose.’ He interleaves his travel writing with successful short novels, which he sees as a kind of therapy, ‘a reaction to travel.’ Often they are set in claustrophobic, frenetic environments – a lunatic asylum, a prison, the head of an amnesiac – but, paradoxically, he describes such writing as ‘very liberating.’ Inner and outer life are, after seventy years, still just as much of an exuberant challenge as they ever were.

As our conversation draws to a close, he speaks of the writers and human beings whom he most admires – among them the great travellers Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor – with an immense affection. ‘Some people you meet and come away feeling the world is a grander place.’ I leave his house, and on either side of me the streets stretch away to infinity.

If there is one thing I learned from A Single Man, it is, as the protagonist says, that nothing seems to go as planned. For starters, I hadn’t planned on being so captivated by this gem of a film, which is so exquisitely rendered in the most heart-wrenching way.

A Single Man, based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood, follows George (Colin Firth), a British ex-pat who has just lost his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a tragic car accident. George spends his days as an English professor lecturing to apathetic students at a California university, and his nights wishing he didn’t. We meet him on a seemingly typical day, as he goes to work, withdraws money from the bank, talks to his friend Charley (Julianne Moore), and calmly puts the final touches on his plan to kill himself at the end of the day, right down to the gun in his desk drawer. The plot as a whole is very Mrs. Dalloway-esque, as it jumps back and forth between Firth’s golden memories of his past and his grey, empty present. He is a man continually stuck in the in-between, made worse by the film’s setting during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where everyone is straining against the needs of day-to-day life and the desperate desire to run around screaming in frustration.

Firth is at his very best – his grey, weary face, so exhausted in its grief, is spellbinding, as he wanders about his day in a perfectly pressed suit. It’s refreshing to see him in something where he doesn’t play an uptight, emotionally void, bumbling twit, dressed in some unfortunate period costume ranging from tights to Christmas jumpers? Moore is also devastating as Charley, a desperate middle-aged California housewife, in love with George in the most impossible way, and waiting for her life to begin.

Of all the films I have seen the past year, A Single Man, is by far the most achingly beautiful. Tom Ford, a former fashion designer-turned first time-director, does an excellent job in the aesthetic sense. Each frame seems to burst onto the screen, snapshots of the most perfect proportions. His attention to detail – the curve made by the sweep of inky black eyeliner, the wafting tendrils of smoke as it leaves one’s lips – gives the film a sense of an almost hyper-reality, as California life can so often be. It is this overwhelming sense of careful control that makes the underlying tension so palpable – the film is a never-ending series of beautiful images just waiting to give way into chaos. A Single Man slows a bit in the middle, but it is this sense of complacency that lulls the audience, making the surprise ending that much more of a surprise. Expect the unexpected in this truly heartbreaking work of staggering beauty.

4 stars

After a few years of absence, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra returned to town on Friday thanks to Music at Oxford. The orchestra grew steadily in size and reputation since Elgar conducted its inaugural concert in 1920, but it became one of the UK’s finest ensembles when it was headed by Sir Simon Rattle (now the director of the Berliner Philharmoniker). 

Since 2008, the young Andris Nelsons has been its Music Director, and his almost flawless performance this week – part of a string of highly-acclaimed live performances and recordings – showed that the orchestra’s worldwide reputation will only grow under this new leadership. 

The performance opened with Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, no doubt familiar to most people as a nightmarish work adopted by a plethora of films, adverts and bands. Although it is difficult to block out the sound of cliché that can’t help but present itself in such a piece, the intimate nature of the Sheldonian gave this devilish music an impact that bordered on the right side of overwhelming. Nelsons handling of the orchestra’s remarkably refined sound also brought out the great colours offered by Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration. 

Also on the programme of Russian music was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The sorrow of the first movement perfectly complemented the Mussorgsky, and, after a beautiful horn solo by Elspeth Dutch in the second movement, the finale was played with such triumph that it won’t soon be forgotten. There were moments when the music could have been played with greater tenderness, but perhaps the music would have sounded softer in a larger venue like Birmingham’s own Symphony Hall. 

The highlight of the evening was the piece sandwiched by the two giants above – Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, with Baiba Skride as soloist. It acted as a great bridge between the two other pieces, with its grotesque first movement executed by Skride with an ironically sweet tone on her Stradivarius ‘Wilhelmj’ violin (1725). Even her sombre-looking green dress fitted the music, and her wonderfully energetic playing of the demonic Scherzo had the audience gasping by the climax. 

By the time Skride had negotiated the cadenza of the third movement, speaking through her violin as though Shostakovich himself had told her how to play, it became clear that she is a serious contender. Since David Oistrakh’s famous recording of the concerto, only Maxim Vengerov’s seems to have come close in quality and excitement. Thankfully, Skride recently recorded the piece with the Munich Philharmonic, and it is a must-buy for any serious Shostakovich fan. Anybody wishing to explore more of Skride’s interpretations might also be interested in her CD featuring Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, which was recorded with none other than Andris Nelsons and the CBSO.

A packed chamber at the Oxford Union saw OUABC succumb at the annual ‘Town vs Gown’ Boxing Event.

Despite some impressive victories and close-fought bouts, the ‘Town’ fighters showed their might, triumphing 7-4. Cherwell photographer Jessica Butler was among the crowd to witness Wednesday’s match.

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