Long, Soggy, Overwrought 'Amistad' Plays Heavily on White liberal Guilt

Well, that's it. Steven Spielberg gets the Golden Ladle Award. In a desperate attempt to relive the legitimacy and respect seemingly conferred on him after Schindler's List, Spielberg thought he'd wash the bad taste of The Lost World out of his mouth by once again tackling human suffering. In Amistad, the story of a shipful of African slaves and their struggle for freedom, he pulls out all the stops, pouring on the pathos and the pity, spooning on the sympathy and drenching it all in melodrama. Spielberg has apparently decided to stop making films and instead to start performing "filmmaking." Despite a number of excellent performances, what could very well have been a poignant and emotional tale is so concertedly and self-consciously delivered that it just comes out muddied and misconceived.

What is most upsetting about the film is the shameless methods used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. You could cut the white liberal guilt in the theater with a knife. Even though the real issue at hand is mostly a technical legal and political question, Spielberg some-how extrapolates it so that it becomes a question of slavery versus non-slavery, of purist evil against innocent victims.

Not only does he unfairly exploit this real and sensitive issue as a cheap emotional trigger, but he is so confident with this ruse that he neglects to actually personify the evil at hand. With forced and belabored "filmmaking," he painfully portrays the anguished and horrid plight of the Africans so as to equate any and all adversaries they might have, whether they be Spanish slave traders, greedy British sailors or the American legal system--which he only later in the movie realizes is actually defending them. His treatment seems to raise a long, accusatory finger at somebody, but doesn't make clear who, so that while nobody is actually defending slavery during the body of the movie, the audience comes away with a sense that they need to feel guilty about something.

Amistad is based on a true story which took place in 1839--the saga of a failed mutiny on board a Spanish slave ship and the series of trials that followed to determine the fate of the slaves on board. A number of parties, including Queen Isabella II of Spain, the Spaniards on board the ship, representatives from Cuba and a pair of British naval officers made claims to ownership of the ship and its cargo of slaves once it turned up on American shores. Abolitionists, here portrayed by Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey, tried to have the slaves set free altogether.

McConaughey's lawyer wins his case before a series of judges and succeeds in having the slaves declared not the legal property of Spain and instead free. But President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) intervenes so as to appease the pro-slavery South, and the case eventually goes to the Supreme Court. Former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) comes out of retirement to argue the case in that historic venue.

Although their credibility is ultimately undermined by Spielberg's treatment, the movie does contain numerous excellent acting performances. Djimon Hounsou plays the chief African with true and awesome pathos and power. He does more than anything else in the movie to inspire sympathy for the African's cause, and some of the scenes in which he attempts to communicate with his American counsels are quite touching. Hopkins is superb as the embittered yet wise ex-president. His long speech to the Supreme Court at the end is one of the most sincere and meaningful moments in the film.

Throughout the movie, Spielberg takes special care to favor the Africans in all of their trials and tribulations, without adequately developing all sides of the issue, or even clearly defining what the issue is. He provides an overwrought sequence depicting the Africans' torment at the hands of the slave traders, self-consciously attempting to be "powerful." The characters in the movie, let alone the audience, certainly don't need the guilt Spielberg tries to foist upon someone, anyone, with this sequence, especially since the cruelty of the slave trade is never at issue in any of the trials. As soon as the Africans start having legal difficulties, the film shifts to make a sham out of the American judicial system. The very framework which winds up championing the Africans' cause with morality and persuasiveness is portrayed, in turn, as incompetent, overly bureaucratic and corrupt, to further sympathy for the Africans. The audience was so drowned in their white liberal guilt by the end that they seemed almost disappointed when the American system proved to work in the end, and to be based on virtue, eloquence and justice.

Despite Spielberg's efforts, however, certain techniques he uses seem to undermine his paradigm that the African is always right. On the boat, after the mutiny, the Africans speak their native language to each other without translation, while the Spaniards they kept alive to help steer the boat are provided with subtitles--a conspicuous effort to lend a sense of foreignness to the Spaniards and a universality to the endeavors of the Africans. The fact remains, though, that the audience does not understand what the Africans say, so while the Spanish dialogue has some import, that of the Africans' is relegated to incomprehensibility. Later on, inconsistent application of subtitles makes further unclear who is meant to be foreign.

For this movie, scorewriter John Williams studied African traditional music and integrated it with the Western musical idiom he usually works in. The movie teases us with this traditional music, but uses it only to underscore savagery and apparent backwardness; any scene of real emotional charge or import to the plot is backed up with a typical Western-style orchestra and chorus. At one point, the Africans seem to have converted to Christianity, as they apparently hold aloft and make supplications to a copy of the Bible, a turn of events more than a little disturbing and perverse.

The most detrimental fact to this paradigm is that the Africans in question were captured and sold into slavery by their fellow Africans, certainly a crime nearly as heinous as the actual practice of slavery. Spielberg does show us this, but very matter-of-factly, with nowhere near the emotional charge or passion with which he depicts the whites' treatment of the slaves. For the latter, he calls forth tempestuous lightning storms for back-drop, while he shows us shot after shot of pained, anguished, screaming faces in fast montage, while the former is simply and briefly shown with ordinary straight-on camera work. While he graphically lays bare the folly, political entanglements and carnage of the American Civil War which followed close on the heels of the movie's main events, the fact that the Africans returned to Africa to find their own tribe engaged in civil war and their families sold into slavery is relayed only through small sub-titles at the film's end.

These conflicting messages, juxta-posed with the simple-minded and underhanded nature of the white liberal guilt invoked to stir up the audience, leave the audience unsure what they were supposed to have been routing for and exactly what message has just been forced down their throats. In reality, the only palpable things forced down their throats were their own Adam's apples.