“Sir, this war must be waged on the battlefield of righteousness.”
“The what?”
- Amistad
I’ve always had a soft spot for Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. I think this puts me in some kind of minority, as that film is often Exhibit A in the Case Against Spielbergian Sanctimony. It certainly has its flaws – John Williams’s score, while lovely, swells a bit too much; Morgan Freeman gets a couple of dreadfully on-the-nose scenes; and “Give…us…free” is probably some sort of low-point for the director. But dear god, there’s so much to love here, too, quite aside from the fact that it’s a gripping, well-told historical-legal epic. Consider: The haunting scenes depicting the terror and bewilderment of the mutinous slaves as their ship comes closer ashore, or the extended flashback to the “Middle Passage” that occurs right at the mid-point of the film and spreads out in all directions like a gaping wound. And it has some of the finest performances Spielberg has ever directed, including Djimon Hounsou’s as the slave leader Cinque. The actor makes clear that the character’s fury is rooted not just in plain old anger or fear but in frustration: Cinque knows what’s going on but, a stranger in a strange land, lacks the language to express himself.
Amistad has been much on my mind lately, because it makes an appropriate companion piece with Lincoln. Not only are both films about slavery, but they’re about the specifically legal and political machinations by which the institution was maintained and then finally dismantled. Together, the two make a uniquely American diptych: They’re about a festering moral crime which needed the wedding of idealism and practicality, along with the efforts of good men, to be righted.
