Amistad (1997)

AMISTAD is no SCHINDLER’S LIST. Think it unfair if you must, but Steven Spielberg is going to face comparisons like that for the rest of his film-making career.
Now that we know what he’s capable of, we’re not going to let him get away with choosing less than stellar material.
AMISTAD is hardly a half-hearted effort, in fact there are a couple of scenes which rank with Spielberg’s best work as a director. It is, however, a piece of material which ends up providing far less impact than it should. The film is based on the true story of a 1840s court case involving 44 black men and women, led by Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), accused of piracy for an uprising against their capters on the Spanish slaving ship “La Amistad.” Found off the coast of Long Island by a U.S. Navy ship, the blacks become the subject of an intense and controversial series of legal challenges. Are they the property of the two surviving members of the “Amistad” crew? Are they the property of Queen Isabella (Anna Paquin)? Are they the property of the naval officers who claim salvage rights? Or are they the property of no one, free men illegally captured from their homes in Africa?
It is the latter point which is argued by attorney Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), assisted by abolitionists Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) and Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgaard), with further assistance from former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins). Faced with direct opposition from struggling incumbent President Martin Van Buren, the case becomes a flashpoint for Southern grumbling over the slavery issue. Baldwin tries to overcome a profound language gap and get Cinque to tell his own story. AMISTAD is at its best when Cinque is telling his story, allowing the electrifying performance of Djimon Hounsou to take center stage. Though he utters only half a dozen English words through the entire film, Hounsou’s fervent work brings to life an intelligent man trying to understand a thoroughly baffling new world. He is the heart and soul of AMISTAD.
If it had ever been made clear that AMISTAD is Cinque’s story, the film could have been a masterpiece. Instead, David Franzoni’s script allows too many characters to flirt with the impression that the story is all about them. Freeman, as a former slave turned anti-slavery advocate, somehow gets first billing despite disappearing for most of the film, McConaughey plays his noble lawyer from A TIME TO KILL, but without a sense of what the case means to him.
The second best performance in the picture, and the only one with any depth, is given by Anthony Hopkins as the semi-senile, ex-president John Quincy Adams. Adams comes into the story mainly in the second half as he argues the slaves’ case in front of the Supreme Court. “We’ve come to understand that who we are is who we were,” he orates in his moving and complicated address to the court.
Even given the film’s tedious pacing, the slaves’ story doesn’t quite come out. We see extremely gory pictures of naked people being beaten to death as their blood splatters everyone nearby, and we see naked human beings chained together, attached to a weight and thrown to their deaths in the ocean.
“Whoever tells the best story wins,” is Adams’s advice on how best to conduct the trial. Spielberg should have listened. All in all, AMISTAD is an excellent story, poorly told.

Rating- B

Abhilash D