Winnie Mandela

Part of the problem is that co-writer/director Darrell Roodt falls into the common biopic trap of trying to distill Mandela's entire life into a limited running time (in this case a mere 107 minutes), an approach that almost always leaves some of the most interesting material on the table in favor of speeding along to the next big event. That's especially restrictive in Winnie Mandela's case since, to be fair, so many of the major events in her life revolved around her husband's prison sentence. Barely 15 minutes have elapsed, during which we briefly glimpse Winnie's childhood in a rural village and her subsequent trip to the big city in order to attend a prestigious school, before she meets Nelson (Terrence Howard) and his concerns and public crusade to win more rights for native South Africans very quickly become hers. Not long after their marriage (which happens at about the half-hour mark), he's arrested, given a show trial and deposited in prison, leaving Winnie to continue the fight on the outside. Over the next 27 years, from 1963 until Mandela's release in 1990, she raises their children, campaigns for her husband's release, becomes a leading voice against apartheid and endures her own brutal stint in jail.

All of these events are depicted in the movie, but what's not onscreen is a vivid sense of who Winnie Mandela was and is. As written and played by Hudson, she has one defining character trait: steely defiance, which -- in the movie's version of events anyway -- stems from her desire to prove her worthiness to her father, who always wanted a male heir. And while Hudson plays that one note well (she's come a long way in emoting onscreen since her Dreamgirls turn, where she seemed stiff and uncertain whenever the music stopped), it's not enough to sustain the character over the course of the movie. Roodt also skims over the most controversial -- and therefore dramatically rich -- part of Winnie's life, when, during the '80s, she allegedly embraced a more violent approach to fighting for equal rights and was even tried and convicted in the death of a teenager who may have been an informant. Instead, the focus keeps drifting back to the other Mandela and the way his wife's activities affect him rather than her, up to his eventual decision to divorce her after his release lest her reputation affect his fledgling Presidency. The entire movie feels like a backdoor pilot for the Nelson Mandela movie Roodt wanted to make… if only Elba and Long Walk to Freedom director Justin Chadwick hadn't beaten him to it.