Film - Morgan Freeman as Mandela in Invictus - Rugby as Statecraft - NYTimes.com MORGAN FREEMAN has been cast as God - twice - so he evidently has no trouble projecting moral authority. The challenge of portraying Nelson Mandela, then, was not the size of the halo, but knowing the performance would be measured against the real, familiar Mandela, and his myth. "If we can say any part of acting is hard, then playing someone who is living and everybody knows would be the hardest," Mr. Freeman said in a phone interview. The role has defeated actors as varied as Danny Glover (the 1987 TV film "Mandela"), Sidney Poitier ("Mandela and de Klerk," 1997, also for TV) and Dennis Haysbert ("Goodbye Bafana," 2007), in vehicles that were reverential and mostly forgettable. But as someone who studied Mr. Mandela over the course of three years while he replaced an apartheid regime with a genuine democracy, I found Mr. Freeman's performance in the film "Invictus," directed by Clint Eastwood, uncanny - less an impersonation than an incarnation. He gets the rumble and halting rhythm of Mr. Mandela's speech, the erect posture and stiff gait. There is a striking physical resemblance, enhanced by the fact that Mr. Freeman, 72, is just a few years younger than Mr. Mandela was in the period the film covers. More important, Mr. Freeman conveys the manipulative charm, the serene confidence, the force of purpose, the hint of mischief and the lonely regret that made Mr. Mandela one of the most fascinating political figures of his time. This is not, as the film's screenwriter, Anthony Peckham, put it, "Rich Little doing Mandela in Vegas." It's hard to say whether Americans at this moment in their history crave a 130-minute parable of racial reconciliation built around a 1995 World Cup rugby match in South Africa. Audiences and movie critics will render their verdict on "Invictus," which reaches theaters Friday. But we could probably do worse, as an antidote to the cynicism on the noisy margins of our political life, than spending a couple of hours watching Mr. Mandela calculating how to knit together a grotesquely divided society. The story of "Invictus," drawn from John Carlin's book "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation," begins with the newly inaugurated president of post-apartheid South Africa looking for ways to enlist his fearful white minority - with its talent, wealth, resentment and capacity for insurrection - in the business of governing a democracy. His inspired stratagem is to embrace the Springboks national rugby team, the darlings of the formerly ruling Afrikaners and, for most nonwhite South Africans, a symbol of brutal and humiliating repression. The new president sets the team's captain (François Pienaar, played by Matt Damon) the improbable goal of winning the World Cup; the tournament is to be held in South Africa in a year, and the Springboks are given little chance. Mr. Mandela sets himself the considerably more improbable goal of uniting country behind the team. So loathed were the Springboks that those few blacks who showed up for matches rooted loudly for the other side. So the rugby campaign was one of Mr. Mandela's boldest strokes of statecraft, no less impressive for the fact that the euphoria he achieved could barely begin to extinguish three centuries of racial antagonism. Mr. Freeman's occupational association with South Africa began with a role in the 1992 film "The Power of One," the pious tale of a white boy coming to enlightenment in apartheid South Africa. Soon thereafter Mr. Freeman made his directing debut with a more tough-minded film, "Bopha!," the story of a conflicted black South African cop, played by Mr. Glover. Lori McCreary, who was a producer on that film and is a producer of "Invictus," said she tried to lure Mr. Freeman for the lead part in "Bopha!," but was told he "doesn't do accents." According to Mr. Freeman, his mission to portray Mr. Mandela on the screen began with a public invitation from the subject himself. At a press conference to promote the publication of his 1994 memoir, "Long Walk to Freedom," someone asked Mr. Mandela who should play him in the movie. "And he said he wanted me," Mr. Freeman recalled. So it became. That was the whole sanction, right there. The South African film producer Anant Singh, who bought the movie rights to "Long Walk," arranged for Mr. Mandela and Mr. Freeman to meet. "I told him that if I was going to play him, I was going to have to have access to him," the actor said. That I would have to hold his hand and watch him up close and personal. As president Mr. Mandela could be surprisingly approachable - he once allowed me, the New York Times correspondent in South Africa at the time, to shadow him during a day of his presidency, something I can scarcely imagine an American president allowing. But since stepping down in 1999, and especially since his memory began to fail him, he has become more reclusive, protected by a staff that worries he might embarrass himself. But he obliged Mr. Freeman. "Whenever we've been in proximity in one city or another, I have had access to him," the actor said. Their encounters ranged from tea at Mr. Mandela's home in Johannesburg to a charity fund-raiser in Monaco. But through multiple screenplays Mr. Mandela's sprawling memoir proved too unwieldy for a film, and Mr. Freeman abandoned the project. "There's just too much to whittle down to movie size," Mr. Freeman said.