I saw this movie at TIFF and thought it was a very sad attempt to tell a very important story. Winnie Mandela herself is often a character that is larger than life, and the events surrounding Nelson Mandela's trials and incarcerations always deserve respect in how they're presented.
Instead, this movie was choppy and disjointed and just a collection of hollow and pointless scenes, strung together with little reason or coherence. There is not much depth to any one scene, as if the director couldn't decide what to concentrate on and whose story it really was. Because of this, everything came across as empty and woefully underdeveloped. When dealing with a story as broad-reaching as Mandela's importance and impact with the anti-apartheid movement, you need to pick one point of view and stick with that; this director was all over the map, so that nothing was fleshed out properly.
The acting, save for Terrence Howard, was embarrassingly stiff and disjointed. Jennifer Hudson never let you forget that she was just acting, that these lines were written for her by someone else. I would wonder if she did any research before shooting and really understood what someone like Winnie Mandela would go through, and what it would be like to have a flawed personality that wasn't always angelic and heroic. While her Oscar for Dreamgirls was well-earned, I would hesitate to actually call her a real actress with range and presence. She was definitely in over her head here.
All in all, it was very unfulfilling and seemed to serve no purpose. It's no wonder that it has yet to be released in theatres or even to DVD, which, considering the amount of story that can be told about the Mandela family, is an inexcusable failure.
Instead, this movie was choppy and disjointed and just a collection of hollow and pointless scenes, strung together with little reason or coherence. There is not much depth to any one scene, as if the director couldn't decide what to concentrate on and whose story it really was. Because of this, everything came across as empty and woefully underdeveloped. When dealing with a story as broad-reaching as Mandela's importance and impact with the anti-apartheid movement, you need to pick one point of view and stick with that; this director was all over the map, so that nothing was fleshed out properly.
The acting, save for Terrence Howard, was embarrassingly stiff and disjointed. Jennifer Hudson never let you forget that she was just acting, that these lines were written for her by someone else. I would wonder if she did any research before shooting and really understood what someone like Winnie Mandela would go through, and what it would be like to have a flawed personality that wasn't always angelic and heroic. While her Oscar for Dreamgirls was well-earned, I would hesitate to actually call her a real actress with range and presence. She was definitely in over her head here.
All in all, it was very unfulfilling and seemed to serve no purpose. It's no wonder that it has yet to be released in theatres or even to DVD, which, considering the amount of story that can be told about the Mandela family, is an inexcusable failure.