Funny how history’s successes are so often easily forgotten but its failures—often measured in terms of millions of lives or countries in ruin—are indelibly stamped into books and plastered on the silver screen.

Not long ago, history at the movies meant battling over the beaches of Normandy or the plains of Scotland or the hot sand in ancient Rome’s Coliseum. Our reminders were usually colored blood red.

But something in Hollywood awakened. Quiet little cinematic “footnotes” of history began to appear, intelligent efforts like Stephen Frears’ “The Queen” and Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon.” Nobody died or even bled much, and CGI crews took the week off.

Now along comes yet another footnote of success, hardly inconsequential but benign enough (no holocaust, no genocide) to be little remembered by most in this country.

In 1990, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison; an unprecedented power shift changed a nation, and then—as the world held its breath—life went on as usual. Not much there that the old rough-and-tumble Hollywood could sink its teeth into.

But director Clint Eastwood finds a way, with a lovingly crafted, seemingly incongruent tale of forgiveness and resolution and redemption.

In “Invictus,” Morgan Freeman plays Mandela, who, after being elected president of the African National Congress, steps into his office on day one and is overwhelmed by the daunting tasks ahead of him.

Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, captain of South Africa’s uninspired rugby team. The two leaders seem unlikely to ever meet. But Mandela sees the sport as a possible way to help unite his country.

For the first half of the film, Mandela quietly assumes command of South Africa and wonders how to make things work. In the last half of the film, Pienaar and his mostly white teammates attempt to win rugby’s prestigious World Cup. Somehow, these two disparate story arcs come together and blend almost seamlessly.

“Invictus” is a riveting film (don’t ask me why, it just is ). Okay, I’ll hazard a guess. It’s the script. Quiet, compassionate, compelling. Eastwood throws in a few moments of needless tension (well-done, however), but otherwise stays on an apparently accurate course of events that helped bond a nation.

There’s an epic quality at play here, not only in Mandela’s famous attempts to peacefully unite South Africa but also, in the film’s latter half, on the rugby field during the World Cup. Yet there’s also a genuine intimacy between Mandela and Pienaar— much of it unspoken—so much so that the few words that pass between them clap like thunder. Freeman and Damon are wonderful here, rarely on screen together but, even off camera, somehow always part of the story’s forward momentum.

Okay, so rugby’s one of those games that’s probably slipped under your radar. Mine, too. Think of it as football without the helmets or forward passes and with a lot more kicking. In South Africa, before Mandela’s release from prison, rugby was an Afrikaner sport—a white man’s game that represented, to the black majority, an era of relentless oppression.

Yet Mandela, with Pienaar’s help, managed to bring the game to the people, to use the sport as a uniting force. Some may sense a sugarcoating here or there, but I found the film genuinely uplifting. Watch “The Blind Side” and “Invictus” back to back and even the most sports-averse among us may be tempted to catch a game or two, just in hopes of catching that good-all-over feeling.

Rugby and that warm, cuddly glow. Together. Who knew!

By the way, the film takes its name from an poem by England’s William Ernest Henley. The poem, a favorite of Mandela’s, concludes: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

The word is Latin for unde feated .