director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriter
David Franzoni
producers
Debbie Allen
Steven Spielberg
Colin Wilson
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Morgan Freeman (Theodore Joadson)
Nigel Hawthorne (Martin Van Buren)
Anthony Hopkins (John Quincy Adams)
Djimon Hounsou (Cinqué)
Matthew McConaughey (Roger Baldwin)
David Paymer (Forsyth)
Pete Postlethwaite (Holabird)
Stellan Skarsgård (Lewis Tappan)
Anna Paquin (Queen Isabel)
Tomas Milian (Calderón)
Paul Guilfoyle (Attorney)
Peter Firth (Captain Fitzgerald)
Xander Berkeley (Hammond)
Jeremy Northam (Judge Coglin)
Arliss Howard (John C. Calhoun)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 152m
u.s.
release: 12/10/97
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- munich
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
- war
of the worlds
|
Amistad is a great story on paper. In 1839,
the Cuban slave ship La Amistad is carrying a full cargo
of Africans across the Atlantic. One of the slaves, called Cinqué
(Djimon Hounsou), uses a nail to pop his shackles open and frees
his fellow captives, leading them in a bloody mutiny. The ship
winds up not back in Africa but off the coast of Connecticut,
where the Africans are arrested. A group of well-meaning abolitionists
buzz around the case like moths around a flame. The fate of these
Africans, the abolitionists realize, will be the fate of democracy
itself.
Given this material, and given the director -- Steven Spielberg,
who proved with Schindler's
List that he has the chops for vivid, unblinking historical
filmmaking -- it's more than a little shocking how remote, impersonal,
and flat-out boring Amistad is. Except for the scenes
aboard the ship, which have a feral power comparable to the liquidation
sequence in Schindler's List, the movie is dry and dawdling,
haphazardly structured, and grindingly obvious. There are those,
I assume, who will insist that the message that slavery is bad
needs to be hammered home every so often. Fine. But noble goals
don't make a dull film interesting.
The ugly flashes of atrocity we see late in the film, as Cinqué
relates the suffering of the Middle Passage, are also the only
flashes we get of Spielberg the great director; elsewhere in
this long movie, his crackling storytelling is nowhere evident.
Instead we get Spielberg the emotional bully (coating "uplifting"
scenes with John Williams' ickiest score in years) and Spielberg
the dutiful teller of someone else's story. I never felt that
he was engaged in the material -- except when he stages the sadism
aboard the ship (which, if you think about it, is a bit disturbing).
Amistad devotes itself to scene after scene of drably
attired white guys arguing over what should be done with the
Africans, where they came from, etc. The Africans themselves
are generally a faceless, abstract bunch, and even Cinqué
is never quite real to us. Djimon Hounsou, a model, has an imposing
presence and goes as far as David Franzoni's sketchy script allows,
which isn't far. At times, Spielberg comes close to fetishizing
Cinqué's stoic, noble blackness; Cinqué is like
an African superhero in a comic book, and we get no sense of
his life before slavery or what the experience has done to him
besides make him stronger. Many, many other slaves aboard the
Amistad suffer and die, but he survives, apparently because
he's just so darn photogenic. He's never more than an icon of
endurance.
The whites are just as blurry. Matthew McConaughey, as the passionate
legal eagle Roger Baldwin, comes off as a 19th-century version
of a John Grisham hero. Fine actors like Nigel Hawthorne and
Pete Postlethwaite drop in and out of the movie without making
a ripple; David Paymer narrowly beats McConaughey for the title
of Least Plausible Actor in a Period Setting. Morgan Freeman
gets top billing as an abolitionist who stands around thinking
important things -- at least I assume that's what he's doing,
because he doesn't do anything else.
I can marginally recommend Amistad for one performance:
Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, the ex-president who lumbers
out of retirement to defend the Africans before the Supreme Court.
As usual, Hopkins is borderline hammy, but his showmanship is
like a jolt of caffeine; when he commands a guard to remove Cinqué's
shackles, his voice has the snap of unquestionable authority.
That's what's missing from the rest of Amistad (which
could have used a whole lot more of Hopkins). In other movies,
whether serious or escapist, Steven Spielberg has shown that
same kind of authority -- in the clarity and economy of his filmmaking.
You felt that he knew what he was doing and why. In Amistad,
you sense him stumbling around the subject, trying to figure
out what he's doing and why. While this might be an interesting
way for an experimental artist to work, it doesn't suit a master
entertainer like Spielberg. We don't know what he's doing
or why, either, and before long the movie just dries up and blows
away. |
