Morgan Freeman

Robert Redford plays the grizzled, emotionally impaired rancher (he has the aggressively fictional name Einar Gilkyson) who’s dismayed when his son’s widow, Jean (Jennifer Lopez), whom he hasn’t seen since his son’s funeral, shows up on his down-at-the-heels Wyoming ranch with her 11-year-old daughter, Griff (the astute, appealing Becca Gardner), in tow. Einar blames Jean for his son’s death — he died in a car accident, and she was the one behind the wheel — but we know for sure (just as surely as he doesn’t) that his resentment is just a feeble attempt to cover his pain. We also know, as sure as Heidi wears a dirndl, that Griff is going to win her grandfather’s affection. But for now, he’s not budging, and Jean needs his help: She’s finally gotten up the nerve to leave her dangerously abusive boyfriend, and she has nowhere else to go.

Einar welcomes Jean and Griff with barely a grunt, although he does show a touching tenderness with Mitch (Morgan Freeman), his longtime ranch hand and the man who has suffered so greatly at the mitts of that angry bear. Einar massages Mitch’s ravaged back with businesslike authority; he administers the morphine shots that Mitch needs daily with the same matter-of-fact detachment that he shows while milking his one remaining cow. And when the bear shows up on Einar’s property again — he wanders into town, looking quizzically over a fence at a little girl on a tricycle, before scaring a bunch of preteen boys off their banana-seat bikes — Einar goes after him with a shotgun: This is one problem he can solve. But Einar is talked out of firing his gun by the local sheriff (Josh Lucas), and the bear instead ends up as a pitiful caged attraction at a local park, a development that greatly distresses Mitch, who insists on calling the big lummox “my bear.”

There’s lots of criss-crossing bonding going on in “An Unfinished Life”: Man with daughter-in-law and granddaughter, man with bear, and so forth. And the fact that it all sounds so nuts on paper, yet seems so confoundingly sensible on the screen, is testament to Hallström’s gifts. “An Unfinished Life” is an extremely well-made picture, perhaps sometimes too well made: It moves forward with the efficiency of a well-greased machine. Still, it’s pleasurable in itself to see the control Hallström has over the picture. And his cinematographer, the great Oliver Stapleton, pulls off some astonishingly casual-looking shots whose brilliance doesn’t hit you until after the fact (as when two barn cats watch Einar, with semidetached interest, from the foreground, as he lopes across his yard in the background).

And even when they’re made to utter dorky dialogue (the abusive boyfriend, a creepy redhead played by Damian Lewis, explains his behavior with lines like “You back me into a corner, and I hate it when I’m like that”), the actors seem to believe deeply in the picture around them, and that makes a difference. Lopez, as always, is a charming, believable presence. (Lopez is too often branded a “bad” actress, a verdict that discounts how immensely likable she manages to be even in the crappiest pictures.) Freeman is Freeman, as dependable as the phases of the moon — he’s good here, even though it’s the kind of “good” he can now deliver in his sleep.

And Redford, even as he’s playing the stock silent guy who, though he’s been weakened by age, is still guided by an impulse to protect the wimmin-folk, is surprisingly entertaining. Redford isn’t an actor I feel much warmth for: With a few exceptions, he has always struck me as a stiff, pretty prop. But even in a business that’s somewhat kinder to aging men than it is to women, Redford’s willingness, finally, to look his age — after struggling too valiantly for years to remind us of his boyish good looks as he started to lose them — is something we shouldn’t take lightly. Redford summons some gnarled emotional complexity here, particularly in a scene where he visits his son’s grave to read him the junk mail he’s still getting, more than 10 years after his death.

And what about the bear? I won’t tell you what happens to him — the credits list him as “Bart the Bear” — though I will tell you he steals every scene he appears in. At one point we see him in his nighttime cage, illuminated by a too-bright overhead light (how’s a bear supposed to get any sleep in here?), hunched in a disconsolate heap. Another time, he’s sprawled in a bored stupor on the floor of his daytime cage, as children wave and chatter at him. We see him only from behind, a depressed blob of silvery-brown fur who’s probably wondering if being made into a rug would really be such a bad thing. This bear is supposed to symbolize many things in “An Unfinished Life”: The inability to let go of grief and anger, and the need for emotional freedom at all costs. But in the end, he’s just a bear, going about the honest business of doin’ what bears do. If anything, he’s a metaphor for the movie itself — a picture that has ambled, almost accidentally, into a time and place where it doesn’t belong.

After you’ve played God — twice, as Freeman has done in Tom Shadyac’s “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty” — and been God, there’s not really much left to do, except play Nelson Mandela. Which is what Freeman does in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” in a performance that starts out plodding and ends up sly. “Invictus” tells the story of how Mandela, after being elected president of South Africa (following a 27-year prison stint), decided to try to unify his deeply damaged country by getting all its citizens — black and white — to rally behind the national rugby team, the Springboks. The country’s black population, the majority, sees the Springboks as a relic of apartheid; the National Sports Council even thinks it might be time to abolish the team. But Mandela, recognizing that you can’t change a country’s future by erasing its past, instead opts to change the nearly all-white team’s image in an effort to get the whole country behind it. To that end, he enlists the help of the team’s captain, François Pienaar (Matt Damon), who accepts his mission with earnest enthusiasm. Among other things, Pienaar gets the team — grumbling at first — out to play ball with the black kids who live in the townships. In the end, it’s not just the team’s image that changes, but the team itself, and as the nation responds in kind, Freeman’s Mandela — seeing that his nonstrategic strategy has worked — loosens up himself. Freeman’s performance actually becomes smaller — more pointed and more focused — instead of bigger, the idea being, perhaps, that this is a man who recognizes that great strides comprise many small steps.

Mandela, who served as South Africa’s president until 1999, is one of the most charismatic and respected modern-day world leaders, the kind of figure plenty of actors would love the chance to play. That’s where the danger lies: It’s easier to play greatness than it is to play a human being, and Freeman, at first, seems to have stepped right into that trap. It doesn’t help that Eastwood, not a particularly subtle director to begin with, can’t seem to forget he’s making a worthy tale of renewal and hope with a massively significant world figure at its center, instead of just telling a good story. The movie’s first third is stiff and dull.

And through that section, so is Freeman. He speaks slowly and solemnly; his brow is furrowed with worry befitting a man who’s just become the leader of a historically troubled nation. It’s not that this isn’t a realistic or believable approximation of Mandela himself; impersonation alone doesn’t make a good performance. A performer has to cut to something deeper.

And eventually, Freeman reaches that something deeper, not by clamping down on the performance, but by loosening his grip on it. Performances are shaped just as narratives are; although scenes aren’t shot in the order in which we see them in a finished movie, a performer still has to bring his character from point A to point B (even if the “point B” scenes are the ones being shot first). What Freeman injects into the second half of “Invictus” is a sense of mischievousness and curiosity: Suddenly, instead of just seeing Nelson Mandela as a great man, we get an idea of how a guy could survive 27 years of unjust imprisonment and, instead of becoming embittered and broken, emerge with a better sense of what makes human beings tick. He has a sense of humor as well as sense of responsibility. At one point we see him learning the names of all the Springboks so he can greet them as if he’s been familiar with them all along — that’s a diplomatic necessity, not a nicety. But when Mandela actually meets the men on the team, he has a little joke or an unspoken moment of connection with each of them. Maybe what Freeman is channeling here is simply the fact that Mandela has the common touch, the ability to make the person he’s speaking to feel like the only one in the room. But Freeman gets the idea across by playing a moment, as opposed to displaying a characteristic. As he chats with those guys — whose life experience couldn’t be further from his own — we see pleasure and duty merge. His smile is cautious but impish. He’s a fan talking to a bunch of sports stars, not a deeply respected world leader.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in “Invictus” when Freeman lets go of playing qualities — dignity, affability, fortitude — and starts playing a person. When he invites Pienaar to tea — it’s their first meeting — he breaks his conversation to greet the older white woman who arrives with the tea tray. “Mrs. Bliss!” he says, in that rolling, velvety voice, “You’re a shining light in my day.” He then introduces her to the rugby star, because she, also, is a person who matters. Bringing that idea home is just one of the many little triumphs Freeman pulls off in “Invictus,” making it a performance of casual warmth instead of a treatise on the idea of greatness.