-By Daniel Eagan

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Continuing a remarkable streak, Clint Eastwood notches another success with Invictus, which uses a rugby championship as a means for examining South Africa's transition from apartheid. Based on real-life events and told with deceptive simplicity, the film is one of the most mature and satisfying releases of the year. But given its challenging subject matter and a crowded holiday marketplace, Invictus may have trouble reaching the audience it deserves.

The film opens with a montage that takes Nelson Mandela from political prisoner on Robben Island to president of South Africa. As played by Morgan Freeman, Mandela is calm and confident, but fully aware that his country could erupt into political violence with the least provocation. Mandela's strategy is to embrace his opposition, a tactic that distances him from his core supporters. Searching for a means to unite the country, he seizes on rugby, a sport with a largely white following.

Since South Africa is hosting the 1995 World Cup, Mandela throws his support behind the Springboks, who are representing the country. Those who don't oppose the sport's racist undertones have little regard for the team's ability to compete on a world stage. In what many see as a quixotic gesture, Mandela appeals personally to team captain François Pienaar (Matt Damon) to lead the Springboks to victory.

When the team embarks on a tour of the country, teaching clinics in shantytowns, the players are exposed to the harsh realities of apartheid. Like Mandela, Eastwood is too subtle to force metaphors or conclusions on his audience. The film's blacks can be as intolerant as whites, for example, and no path is without its troubling consequences. To a surprising degree, especially for a sports story, Invictus is a movie of ideas more than events. When an aide objects to one of Mandela's decrees, he replies, "In this instance, the people are wrong." Would we be able to accept that from our leaders?

When Mandela first meets with Pienaar, they discover shared goals for teammates and South Africans in general: "how to make them better than they think they are." "This country is hungry for greatness," Mandela says later, and Eastwood, one of the premier filmmakers in the world, is able to show that hunger with only a handful of locations and incidents. Not only are the odds against the Springboks very clear, but each gesture by the players, Mandela and his followers is weighted both with hope and expectation and with the fear of failure.

Few commercial directors are as disciplined as Eastwood, and one of the delights in Invictus is how tightly focused its narrative is. Pienaar's visits to his parents, Mandela's efforts to reconcile with his family, and the uneasy relationship between black and white bodyguards are shown with an economy that is bracing. Even the grimy, chaotic rugby matches are filmed in a spare manner that makes them that much more exciting. Every moment counts in Invictus. Perhaps none cuts as deeply as when Pienaar stands in the tiny cell that held Mandela for 27 years, barely able to stretch out his arms.