Winnie Mandela (2013)

Good idea lost in the noise

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

After watching movie Winnie Madikizela Mandela, I wondered how much Winnie, the main character, narrated on this movie about herself. Winnie was referred to as the Mother of the Nation, she was statues and beautiful, very intelligent and warrior spirited. Yet so much was left out about her diplomacy, about how she traveled around the world from country to country to gain world support for the release of her husband Nelson Mandela. The greatness of the woman was laminated to half her greatness in this movie. I remember when Winnie came to United States to meet to appeal the world be aware of apartheid and unjust imprisonment of many South Africans under apartheid. People were naming their children after Winnie and Nelson because of her image, which I must mention was distained. The population of South Africa including Nelson are under the influence of apartheid also Stokholm AND Helsinki syndromes.

"She spent nearly 500 days in prison, 400 of them alone in solitary. She was exiled, they harassed her, they nearly killed her. Her contribution to the struggle is beyond calculation." This movie follows the life of Winnie (Hudson) from birth to her life with husband Nelson Mandela (Howard) and beyond. It shows her transformation from shy student to activist. I hate to admit it but I knew next to nothing about this woman before I started the movie. For that reason going in my first thought was, why make a movie about her when Nelson is much more interesting. After watching this my thoughts changed to why don't they make more movies about her. I'm not sure how accurate this movie is but I found it to be very interesting and really made me feel for her. Seeing a woman who was shy and had her life ahead of her end up being broken by seeing the way her life was affected by her husbands sentence gives you conflicting emotions. On one hand you want her to do the things she is doing while at the same time you know she should stop. The end of the movie is so bittersweet that it's hard to feel happy about what happened. The only really bad thing I have to say about this is that it really had the feel of a Lifetime movie. Overall, my feelings went from why a movie about her to why aren't there more movies about her. I highly recommend this. I give it an A-.

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.

I viewed this at the Toronto International Film Festival where it premiered without a final soundtrack and with the end credits missing. But that's not what's important. Sadly, Winnie bites off more than it can chew due to weak, amateurish writing and clichéd action scenes, choppy story-telling and most of all, the casting of Jennifer Hudson, who is embarrassingly over her head as the love of Mandela's life. The larger historical,political and cultural context of this epic tale is missing, and although the basic 'facts' are there, it comes across as lifeless, wooden, artificial and often cloyingly sentimental. There are some bad choices in the story-telling in the interest of Hollywoodizing the saga for audiences who may not be knowledgeable about South African history or realities. Terrence Howard tries hard against the challenges of a lousy script and heavy-handed direction, and ages brilliantly as Mandela. He can't, single-handedly, save the film, so at the moment, the entire project feels as if it's headed straight to DVD.