In 1994, Steven Spielberg founded, with record producer David Geffin and disgruntled Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks SKG, the first new Hollywood studio in decades. The aim of the studio would be to produce new live-action and animated films that could compete with the established heavyweights like Warner Bros., Universal, and especially Disney, whom Katzenberg had a pretty big grudge against. But this plan never quite panned out, as with the exception of their early animation wing, many of their films had to be co-productions with other studios until they themselves were bought out by Paramount, then emancipated with Reliance, then partnered under Amblin.
One of DreamWorks’ earliest movies, and perhaps the one they wanted to stand as proof of their capabilities was a promising period drama made in conjunction with the smaller HBO Pictures about the famed slave mutiny of the Spanish ship La Amistad and the subsequent trial, directed by Spielberg himself. It seemed beneficial for both the director and the company –for him it was a chance to spread his wings some more, and for them it was a potential dramatic landmark, possibly along the same lines as Schindler’s List. But despite so much potential in its story, Amistad was never going to be that great of a film.
The movie shows how Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), a Mende farmer illegally enslaved, rallied a mutiny of the slaves aboard La Amistad in 1839. At the trial, he is represented by lawyer Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConnaughey) on behalf of abolitionists Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard) and Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) with the hopes of securing release for the Africans to their homeland; while a number of parties including one representing President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) argue disparate cases for their continued servitude.
Being an HBO Film it’s unsurprising that parts of Amistad look and feel like a T.V. movie. Besides the sequences detailing Cinque’s backstory and the horrible realities of the slave ship, the film is just a courtroom drama set nearly two hundred years ago. It’s interesting, and certainly seems to care about historical accuracy in the facts if not the figures, however it still means a lot of arguing before a judge, and presenting and questioning evidence. What Amistad does right is comment less on the minutia of the incident at hand and keep its focus on the institution under judgement. What this movie really is, is Spielberg’s indictment of slavery.
And Spielberg, for all his clout from Schindler’s List, was not the right person to tell this story. The main reason for this should be obvious. The story of a gross generation-spanning injustice so integral to African-American identity is not going to be as truthful or meaningful as it deserves to be if it’s told by a white man, however honourable his intentions are. That dissonance will always hang over cultural stories like this, conveyed by someone outside of that culture. Spielberg doesn’t shy away from the brutality of life on a slave ship though, doing his best to show men and women cramped together naked like cargo, surviving off scraps of food they’re sometimes forced to eat off each other’s faces, and one woman committing suicide with her infant before fifty captives are thrown overboard to lighten the load and avoid British penalty. It’s tough to watch and impeccably directed on its own, but being told in flashback as testimony in a trial robs it of any sense of immediacy or relatability. Cinque concludes his story for the various lawyers to deliberate on it, for good or bad. Amistad is after all, a story of a black man told through a lot of white men.
That doesn’t get in the way of Djimon Hounsou giving a fantastic performance though, possibly the best of his career. He’s passionate, determined, but very humble, insistent that he’s no great leader and only did what he did on La Amistad out of necessity and desperation. Conveying a lot of character, frustration, and brooding heroism without speaking English at all, there really was no better actor to bring Cinque to life than Hounsou and it’s the breakout role he deserved. As for the cast around him, this movie really put in a lot effort to make up for its relative cheapness by an astounding amount of on-screen talent. Matthew McConnaughey’s at the front of it as Cinque’s clever lawyer and does very well. Anthony Hopkins plays his second U.S. President as John Quincy Adams, initially a quiet supporter of the case before becoming its primary spokesperson when it goes to the Supreme Court. There’s a lot of expected grandstanding with his role, giving speeches and generally being portrayed somewhat disbelievingly progressive for the time, largely because of his abolitionist views. Morgan Freeman’s fine, but very unimportant, one of the few characters created solely for the movie. He appears in a few more scenes than Skarsgard but doesn’t contribute much more than as a stark contrast to Cinque in terms of a black person in America. The movie could have explored his relationship to slavery as a freed slave himself, but never does. Nigel Hawthorne playing Van Buren is entertaining in as much as it’s Humphrey Appleby behaving like Jim Hacker. Showing up in smaller roles are Razaaq Adoti, David Paymer, John Ortiz, Jeremy Northam, Peter Firth, and Ralph Brown. Spielberg brought over a couple of his Lost World actors too, as Pete Postlethwaite is once again superb as William Holabird, the head prosecuting lawyer, and Arliss Howard is a strange John Calhoun. The film even works in Anna Paquin as the teenage Queen Isabella of Spain, and the delightful Austin Pendleton plays a linguist ultimately replaced by James Covey as Cinque’s Mende-fluent translator played terrifically by a very young Chiwetel Ejiofor in one of his first screen roles.
Ejiofor’s part in Amistad is especially important given how much of the film is about communication. The Mende dialogue is not subtitled in a smart choice by the filmmakers to emphasize the linguistic barrier and all the more firmly establish Cinque and the other slaves as strangers in a strange land. It’s one of the biggest obstacles in the trial as for the first few hearings Baldwin can’t adequately defend his clients without knowing their story. A number of scenes in the film are given over to Baldwin communicating with Cinque through Covey, the two building a relationship gradually. It also highlights the conceptual barrier, particularly when an impatient Holabird is visibly annoyed that a specific distinction is alien to Cinque, and when Baldwin has to explain to Cinque after winning the trial that the case isn’t actually over yet and that it’s going to the Supreme Court. Naturally, Cinque is pretty angry about this, feeling like he was deceived, and it provides a decent critique of the unnecessary bureaucracy of the U.S. judicial system.
That is another curious thing about Amistad in relation to Spielberg’s work. It’s the first film of his that is consciously political. There have been political themes and ideas in all of his movies of course, it’s unavoidable; but Amistad was the first time he dealt specifically in U.S. politics and as such was in a position to criticize and comment on it. And we see there’s a certain Frank Capra idealism to Spielberg, notable in Adams’ speech at the end, and a real veneration for American democracy that at times can come across a bit too saccharine and disingenuous, indicative of his own perspective on America and its heroes. He would return to this kind of overt subject matter, most notably in Lincoln and The Post, where his brand of liberal idealism would be even more on display. Amistad, in its setting, story focus, and even production design and costuming, directly predicted Lincoln.
Amistand ends in triumph and optimism. There’s clear foreshadowing to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation twenty-three years later, and Cinque and his fellow captives are returned freely to Africa. This is telling as to the distance between the subject matter of this film and the people making it, especially when compared again to Schindler’s List: a film that consciously ended on a note of small but important victory, yet still dismal and solemn in regards to the greater travesty (Schindler’s breakdown at not saving enough was the perfect way to compromise these points). Amistad avoids complexity and doesn’t say much about the broader scope of slavery, merely leaving you on the reminder that liberation wasn’t too far off. Still, the film isn’t terrible for this, just disappointingly sanitized and incomplete. It still has commendable performances and is telling a worthy story, but it’s far from the great movie this topic deserved.
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