The perils of representing on screen someone as familiar as Nelson Mandela put Bille August's film at a disadvantage. It might not have mattered if this story about the prison warder who supervised him in captivity on Robben Island had been a little less ponderous.
Sincere as it patently is, and perfectly competently made, Goodbye Bafana progresses through the last years of the apartheid regime at a snail's pace. The burgeoning friendship between captive and warder is too thinly fleshed out to convince, though the latter's transition from typically racist Afrikaner into liberal South African is at least decently handled.
Dennis Haysbert has the bad luck to play the saintly Mandela and Joseph Fiennes is the warder, and while both are adequate, neither is given the kind of script that might have lit up the film.
Instead we get an unsubtle view of the apartheid era that is full of melodramatic nastiness, with every black a hero and most whites awful. In the film's favour, the production design certainly brings back an era most South Africans will want to forget.
Goodbye Bafana
Cert: 15
