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'Amistad' comes as close as any film I have seen to capturing the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, depicted in many ugly and horrifying scenes. Yet, it is primarily a legal drama, a compelling and absorbing one at that, with a masterful star-making performance from Djimon Hounsou, whose character speaks virtually no English, but conveys volumes with his eyes and facial expressions. He has incredible charisma and screen presence, and it is little wonder he, as Cinque, emerges as the natural leader of the slaves, and serves as their informal representative in court. He is Cinque, who was cruelly abducted from his village in Sierra Leone and sold to Portuguese slave traders. From there, he ends up on the Amistad, a Spanish ship that takes its human cargo to Cuba, still a Spanish colony, where they will work on sugar plantations. Cinque organizes and carries out a revolt against his Spanish captors, leaving only two alive. They promise to turn the ship around and sail back to Africa, but instead cross into American waters, where Cinque and his brethren are put on trial for murder. This happens in the North, where they actually stand a chance. Prominent abolitionist Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard) rallies to their cause, along with former slave turned businessman Theodore Joadson (Freeman). The Amistad insurgents are ultimately represented by Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), a real estate lawyer who argues that the case is really about property rights and little else. The prosecution is led by the nauseating Holabird (Pete Postlethwaite), in close collaboration with John Forsythe (David Paymer), the Secretary of State, Isabelle, the young queen of Spain (Anna Paquin) and the Spanish ambassador. President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) cares only about his re-election campaign, and is intimidated by John Calhoun, the famous Southern advocate for the continuance of slavery, with the promise of civil war unless Van Buren can guarantee that the Africans are found guilty. So, Van Buren oversteps his boundaries and replaces the judge and dismisses the jury. And eventually he will send the case to the Supreme Court, where seven of the justices are in fact slaveholders. Baldwin asserts himself well, but it ultimately falls to former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) to deliver a stirring speech to the Supreme Court about why Cinque and the others deserve their freedom, invoking the American Revolution and the ideals his father and the other founders fought for. This is some of Hopkins's finest acting, and he earned an Oscar nomination. Adams is old and sickly (he would die nine years later, at the age of 81), but still commands respect and gets involved only after Baldwin more or less begs for his assistance. One can assume Adams gets involved also because he doesn't like Van Buren all that much, and wants to draw attention to his abuse of executive power. The film also shows the sad reality of ordinary Africans like Cinque being kidnapped by members of rival tribes and sold to European traders, who give them guns and other such items in exchange. Holabird argues that slavery is not necessarily that immoral; if Africans practice it, why then shouldn't the United States? Cinque has a wife and child back in Sierra Leone, we see them briefly in a flashback, and that is about all we know about his life. Cinque learns a little English while in prison and begins to notice the apparent contradictions in Western law. The Morgan Freeman character is not that important, and doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. He is much like Frederick Douglass, has witnessed the horrors of slavery firsthand, and now enjoys a rather prosperous existence, and is deeply saddened by his inability to connect with men who are so very much like him. McConaughey gives us the same kind of attorney he offered in A Time to Kill, but a bit more polished and more clever with words, though it falls to Hopkins to deliver that all-important speech that will change everyone's minds. Hawthorne effectively presents Van Buren as a man who is both spineless and easily manipulated. The film needs only to show slavery, the images will speak for themselves, and indeed they do. But one is left with a feeling of regret, that this victory, while certainly an unlikely triumph did practically nothing to stop the practice of slavery in the United States, it would take a very bloody civil war for that heinous institution to finally come to an end, several decades after it was abolished by the British and the French. email this review to a friend
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