Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey) is a washed out Hollywood psychiatrist. He supposedly counsels the rich and famous. We don’t really see him doing much of that. Mostly he is smoking, cigarettes for upon awakening, while in the shower, while shaving, and pot whenever he can. Next to his office is an empty lot, and that’s where he sits in a plastic lawn chair smoking next to empty palettes and trash while he should be working. He is a wreck of a man with seemingly no future.

The movie introduces us to a cast of Hollywood neurotics whose stories we are supposed to follow and make sense of. Unfortunately, the story lines get so confusing, you can’t follow them, and in the end you can’t remember who was doing what in the beginning, and you wish you had taken notes and made a map of the movie plot.

This may be the kind of movie that you need to watch more than once to get more out of it. There are such movies, and I enjoy watching them. However, in this case, I can’t make myself do it again. The characters are as shallow as the real-world Los Angeles narcissists they try to portray. There really isn’t anything going on. The sound track is boring. The mood is not developed.

Look at the picture above. Here is the high-powered shrink that came home to his house in the Hollywood hills, great pool, wonderful location, everything we all dreamed of, and he’s got nothing better to do but to pass out on the chaise lounge with pills and wine next to him, only to wake up in the morning gray, shivering. Empty. Look at the picture above, take it in, let it settle, and now you don’t have to watch the movie anymore. You got all that you can get out of this.

Rating: *

If you check my Ratings Key, you will see that one of the criteria for a movie to get four stars is that it must be inspiring.

Invictus is inspiring on so many levels, in so many ways, I am overwhelmed with inspiration, I find it difficult to calm down and write about it, to focus and not come across blabbering from confusion and anxiety.

First, the story: As history shows, South African Nelson Mandela was imprisoned by the Apartheid regime for 27 years of his life, his young, strong, productive years, when the rest of us have careers, children, lives and enjoyment. Mandela was in prison, in a small cell during most of his time, and doing hard labor, the other time. Eventually he abides and gets released, and within a short time he is elected president of South Africa and serves from 1994 to 1999. He leads the country on a path to recovery, by forgiveness, kindness, inspiration and vision. One of the ways he applies his vision and inspiration is by motivating the national rugby team to win the rugby world championship. The movie starts with Mandela winning the office of the presidency and follows him through the achievement of the world cup. No spoilers here, it’s all in the history books.

The movie gets its title from the poem Invictus written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley. The poem gave Mandela purpose and strength during the endless years in prison, and he recites it as he imparts his story. He also uses it to inspire the captain of the rugby team.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, Mandela is played by Morgan Freeman and if I were in charge of awarding Oscars, he would have got Best Actor last year for this rather than Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side. There is no better actor in the world for this role than Freeman. This story was made for Morgan Freeman to play Mandela. The captain of the rugby team,  the Springboks, is Francois, played by Matt Damon. There was something about Damon in this movie that  made him look different enough from Damon that through the entire movie I kept thinking how much this actor looked like Matt Damon without realizing it was actually Damon. Call me obtuse. Watching Invictus took me away from the world, and I didn’t think about actors, roles, stories and my own world. I was simply distracted with inspiration.

I cannot remember an Eastwood movie that I didn’t consider excellent. Clint Eastwood, the awkward cowboy actor of the sixties has turned into an absolute powerhouse of movie making. Unlike many movie makers who dazzle us with technology, mystify us with plot twists and complexities that we can’t follow, shock us with violence, explosions and fire, Eastwood knows how to tell a story and make it so meaningful in a human way that it inspires us. Eastwood movies drive tears to my eyes during the unlikeliest scenes.

Of course, Nelson Mandela is one of the great figures of the twentieth century, right up there with Martin Luther King, FDR, JFK, Gandhi and Winston Churchill. His life has inspired many a movie, book and biography. To capture the essence of a man so large and so overpowering in a movie lasting but a couple of hours, the story is wrapped around the underdog rugby team ‘the Springboks.’ As we have learned from countless sports movies, including the Rocky series and many others, sports movies work in inspiring, just like sports itself works. The large impossible task of running a country and leading it from ruin to greatness is compressed into the task of inspiring a sports team to win the world cup. As the champions grow and win, so the nation follows.

I don’t understand rugby. There are a lot of rugby scenes in Invictus, and they always consist of big thugs with British accents colliding like American football players, but without any padding and helmets. We hear the grunts and the crashes of bone against bone, skull against chest, and we wonder how anybody survives a game of rugby. After watching this, I am thankful I never once had to play that game. I have no broken parts.

In the end, I cheered the Springboks as they won, and when the credits rolled and victory swept South Africa, and the African soundtrack kept playing, I didn’t want the music to end and I didn’t want the victory to stop.

Rating: ****

A couple in their thirties, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) live in a shabby house in the woods, not too far from his parents, when she gets pregnant. They are self-employed. Burt is an insurance broker. Verona is a graphic artist.

“Are we fuck-ups?” Verona asks one night when they sit on their threadbare couch wrapped in an old blanket because it’s freezing and the space heater has just knocked out the electricity. “No, we’re not fuck-ups, why would you say that?” “Because we have a cardboard window.”

They are educated, kind, in love, healthy and it seems they simply haven’t found the time or the reason to rise beyond the orange crates  and bed sheet curtains of college life. But now there is a baby coming. They want to do the right thing for their child. To figure out where they want to live and raise their family, they travel the country, visiting friends and relatives gratefully forgotten. It takes them only hours with each set to realize that there is nothing there for them to learn or even to associate with, and they travel on.

You have to be in the right mood for this movie. You might find nothing in it but a chuckle here and there. Neurotic characters with exaggerated one-dimensional traits make for good drama and laughter, but may not be enough to carry the movie. Not much is going on. A lyrical sound track takes us along, and the scenery tells a story. I found myself homesick for the rocks and saguaros of Arizona. I enjoyed the normalcy and health of Burt and Verona. Seldom do I find characters  in a movie that I’d like to be. They seemed like really good people. I thought I could walk in their shoes for a while.

Rating: **