The Amistad Case in Fact and Film
by Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
at Columbia University

A Triumph of Filmmaking
by Malcolm Johnson
This review ran in the Courant Friday, December 12, 1997

1. The Amistad Case in Fact and Film
by Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
at Columbia University

Compared with most Hollywood megafilms, Amistad must be considered a step forward: it's about slavery, not exploding volcanoes or rampaging raptors. But given that Steven Spielberg is the director, Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman the stars, and a reported $75 million was spent on production, it can only be judged a disappointment. It does contain a few visually compelling moments, such as the scene on a slave ship that viscerally conveys the horrors of the Middle Passage. Overall, however, as a movie Amistad is simply a bore. As history, this account of a Cuban slave ship seized in 1839 by its African captives, and their legal travail that ended in the U. S. Supreme Court, also leaves much to be desired.

Amistad's problems go far deeper than such anachronisms as President Martin Van Buren campaigning for reelection on a whistle-stop train tour (in 1840, candidates did not campaign), or people constantly talking about the coming Civil War, which lay twenty years in the future. Despite the filmmakers' orgy of self-congratulation for rescuing black heroes from oblivion, the main characters of Amistad are white, not black.

The plot pivots on lawyer Roger Baldwin's dawning realization that the case he is defending involves human beings, not just property rights, and on the transformation of John Quincy Adams, who initially refuses to assist the captives but eventually persuades the Supreme Court to order their return to Africa. As in Glory, an earlier film about black Civil War soldiers, Amistad's black characters are essentially foils for white self-discovery and moral growth.

This problem is compounded by having the Africans speak Mende, a West African language, with English subtitles. A courageous decision by Hollywood standards, this device backfired along the way when someone realized that Americans do not like subtitled movies, as foreign filmmakers have known for decades. In the end, most of the Mende dialogue ended up on the cutting- room floor. Apart from the intrepid Cinque, the Africans' leader, we never learn how the captives responded to their ordeal. It would have been far better to have the Africans speak English (the film, after all, is historical fiction), rather than rendering them virtually mute.

Most seriously, Amistad presents a highly misleading account of the case's historical significance, in the process sugarcoating the relationship between the American judiciary and slavery. The film gives the distinct impression that the Supreme Court was convinced by Adams' plea to repudiate slavery in favor of the natural rights of man, thus taking a major step on the road to abolition.

In fact, the Amistad case revolved around the Atlantic slave trade -- by 1840 outlawed by international treaty -- and had nothing whatever to do with slavery as an domestic institution. Incongruous as it may seem, it was perfectly possible in the nineteenth century to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade within the United States.

In October 1841, in an uncanny parallel to events on the Amistad, American slaves being transported from Virginia to Louisiana on the Creole seized control of the ship, killing some crew members and directing the mate to sail to the Bahamas. For fifteen years, American Secretaries of State unsuccessfully badgered British authorities to return the slaves as both murderers and "the recognized property" of American citizens. This was far more typical of the government's stance toward slavery than the Amistad affair.

Rather than being receptive to abolitionist sentiment, the courts were among the main defenders of slavery. A majority of the Amistad justices, after all, were still on the Supreme Court in 1857 when, in the Dred Scott decision, it prohibited Congress from barring slavery from the Western territories and proclaimed that blacks in the United States had "no rights which a white man is bound to respect."

The film's historical problems are compounded by the study guide now being distributed to schools, which encourages educators to use Amistad to teach about slavery. The guide erases the distinction between fact and fiction, urging students, for example, to study black abolitionism through the film's invented character, Theodore Joadson, rather than real historical figures. And it fallaciously proclaims the case a "turning-point in the struggle to end slavery in the United States."

Most galling, however, is the assumption that a subject does not exist until it is discovered by Hollywood. The guide ends with a quote from Debbie Allen, Amistad's producer, castigating historians for suppressing the "real history" of African-Americans and slavery. Historians may be guilty of many sins, but ignoring slavery is not one of them. For the past forty years, no subject has received more scholarly attention. All American history textbooks today contain extensive treatments of slavery, almost always emphasizing the system's brutality and the heroism of those who survived -- the very things Amistad's promoters claim have been suppressed.

If the authors of the study guide really want to promote an understanding of slavery, they should direct students not to this highly flawed film, but to the local library. There they will discover several shelves of books on slavery and slave resistance, from academic tomes to works for children. Maybe, in this era of budget cuts, some of that $75 million could have more profitably been spent on our public libraries.

2. A Triumph of Filmmaking
'AMISTAD' AN ELOQUENT EPIC WONDERFUL TELLING OF HEROIC TALE SHOWS SPIELBERG'S GENIUS

From the start, "Amistad'' reverberates with Steven Spielberg's genius as a filmmaker. It begins with a closeup of a black man in blackness, a half light playing over his strained face, over his frantic, desperate hands. Against the crashing of thunder of a storm at sea, he scratches away madly, then breaks from his iron fetters. Freeing his brother captives, he leads them up on deck, slaughtering most of the crew of the Spanish slave ship.

Spielberg does not flinch from depicting the revolt led by Joseph Cinque as brutal, even savage. The killing of a Spanish officer with the man's own sword -- plunged through him to the hilt -- proves especially visceral, and disturbing. This is what a fight for life by men sold into slavery and chained below decks on the freezing ocean is all about: Throats are cut amid a babel of sounds.

Part of the intelligence of Spielberg's opening can be heard in how he handles the words shouted by the Africans. There are no subtitles, except for the Spanish slavers. By not translating the African tongue, Spielberg illustrates one of the problems faced by the leader, Joseph Cinque, and the 50 or so others after they are captured and held for trial in New Haven. These are men cut off from communicating with their prosecutors, jurors, judges, even their defense counsel. In time, Spielberg does offer subtitles, as in the film's few humorous moments when Cinque jokes with his companion about the white Americans watching as the prisoners are paraded to the courthouse. But the initial barrage of human sounds with no meaning makes the point. Men must be understood to be heard.

There are many potent elements in "Amistad,'' the latest retelling of an explosive event in 19th-century American history that gained new currency 30 years ago, when the poet Robert Lowell dramatized Herman Melville's "Beneto Cereno,'' a fictional version of the Amistad incident. Chief among the attributes of Spielberg's "Amistad'' is the cast, Headed by Anthony Hopkins, in yet another astonishingly right, and gripping, performance. Though glimpsed early in the film as a sleepy, querulous ex-president, still in the shadow of his father, Hopkins' eloquent, unmannered and deeply human depiction of John Quincy Adams brings Spielberg's film to its moving and uplifting final act.

Two other pieces in Spielberg's second masterwork stand out. One is the muscular heroism of Djimon Hounsou's Cinque, a performance that shifts from the fury of his bloody rampage at the start though his passionate plea in gutteral English to the jury -- "Give us us free'' -- to his ultimate joy, and final tragedy. The other is the screenplay by David Franzoni (and an uncredited Steven Zaillan, who wrote Spielberg's other great serious film, "Schindler's List''). The writers project a fine (yet free) sense of the way 19th-century Americans spoke, and have created a structure that combines tension and imagination -- as in the decision to withhold the long flashback illustrating Cinque's capture until well into the trial of the Africans.

The telling of Cinque's story works to offset the dark-toned dramas of the courthouse and the jail with the warm sepias of Africa, and to underline the advice of Adams to the callow defense counsel, Roger S. Baldwin. The crusty Adams tells Matthew McConaughey's scruffy but canny and bold Baldwin that to win the case, he must present the Africans' story.

The story Spielberg has chosen to tell is a complex one. After the revolt during the tempest at sea, the Africans direct two Spanish survivors to take them back to Africa. Instead, the Amistad sails to the coast of New England, where it is captured, and its human cargo jailed. Various plaintiffs claim ownership of the blacks, but Baldwin argues that they are free men, not slaves. His arguments succeed, but politics -- in the person of Nigel Hawthorne's whimisical yet calculating President Martin Van Buren -- intercedes.

Spielberg has rounded up a skillful cast, with an especially affecting performance by Morgan Freeman as the fictional African American abolitionist, Joadson, whose encounter with chains aboard the Amistad has ghostly resonances. Pete Postlethwaite brings a Yankee toughness to the prosecutor, and the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard deftly sketches the pallidness of liberals, then and now, as Joadson's nervous companion. Anna Paquin illustrates the spoiled absurdities of Spain's doll-like teen queen, Isabella, and Austin Pendleton goes back to his Yale roots to pinpoint scholarly fakery in action as an African translator, who ultimately aids the cause. Only David Paymer seems out of place, in his too-modern portrait of Secretary of State John Forsyth.

There are also occasional problems with the rousing but somewhat cliched scoring by John Williams. The blasting of a slave fortress on the African coast seems a bit excessive, and unnecessary. Yet these few flaws pale before the force of the story and the powers of Spielberg's storytelling.

"Amistad'' stands as a triumphant epic, drawn from a difficult, but ultimately proud chapter in the American past, in which justice triumphed over politics and prejudice as a prelude to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.