AMISTAD: A PAEAN TO PAST AGONY

Darkness. Lightning flashes. The planes of what is not at first certainly recognizable as a human face. The wild rolling eye of what might be a desperate and panicked animal. A splash of color–blood seeping from fingers clawing at the shackles of…yes, it is…a man.

This sequence–quick cut, grainy, indelible–serves several functions. It forces us to recognize that slavery is something far worse than nonfreedom, that it is an institution that grants some men the right to utterly dehumanize other men. It completely justifies the bloody murders that ensue when this figure, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), frees himself and leads the human cargo of the slave ship La Amistad in revolt. And slammed at us at the start of Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s movie about that incident, it signals the director’s intention to ignore the principle–lofty sentiments excusing clunky filmmaking–upon which most morally instructive movie epics are built.

That’s no small feat. For the Amistad was eventually taken into custody by a U.S. Navy vessel, and the mutineers charged with murder, threatened with a return to slavery and forced to stand trial three times before they were freed by a Supreme Court decision. Worse, their case became a playground for special interests: abolitionists not at all certain their cause wouldn’t be better served if they allowed the blacks to be martyred; a President, Martin Van Buren, running for re-election and trying to appease the slave states by suborning justice; Spain’s child Queen furious over the loss of one of her ships; the slaves’ owners’ demanding return of their property; even the officers of the ship that intercepted the Amistad claiming salvage rights.

In other words, words–lots of words. But Spielberg is up to their challenge. His handling of the long courtroom scenes is wonderfully alert to unsuspected visual and dramatic possibilities. Better still, he and the screenplay (credited to David Franzoni) are alive to the–yes–sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. In our own age, with democracy travestied by ethnic- and interest-group politicking, the most instructive thing about Amistad may lie in its demonstration that broad principle, shrewdly advanced, can find ways to assert itself amid factional clamor.

Legal maneuver and political maneuver, the dank gloom of the prison into which the Africans are crammed, awaiting their fate, an astonishing evocation of the terrors of the slave ships’ notorious Middle Passage–Spielberg permits himself time to explore every aspect of his saga in rich detail. And he grants his actors–among them a warily compassionate Morgan Freeman as a black abolitionist; Matthew McConaughey as a puppyish lawyer growing into an attack dog; Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, bent with age and crotchets, but finally lending his eloquence to the cause–a similar latitude. It’s a shame that Amistad’s release has been polluted with charges of plagiarism, for what’s on the screen has an emotional and moral weight that is entirely its own.

–By Richard Schickel