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12.10.1997
'Amistad': Epic slow but it hits home

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

Movie credits and review - Projo.com's special on the filming of Amistad

Amistad is the Spanish word for "friendship."

But judging from Steven Spielberg's sometimes eloquent, sometimes exciting, too-often ponderous epic about mutineers on a Spanish slave ship called the Amistad, it could also mean "neverending."

In Amistad, Spielberg is back in his "serious subject" mode, something that came to dazzling fruition with his Oscar-winning fact-based Schindler's List, about an opportunist who went on to rescue Jews from Nazi concentration camps. Amistad, which revolves around questions of slavery and freedom, has similar underpinnings because it's about man's inhumanity toward man and personal liberty.

Yet it's also very different in some important respects.

While Schindler's List focused on the epiphany of one man, who changed his stripes and developed a conscience and then anger about the injustices around him, Amistad's parade of characters -- save for one who has a pivotal, emotional moment in a Roman Catholic church -- never change in their views about slavery. In these decades before the Civil War, they are either pro or anti.

Amistad has an exciting opening sequence -- ominous moments coupled with shots as gory as some right out of the Friday the 13th movies -- and later approaches greatness and high interest in flashback sequences detailing how a group of African slaves got to a New Haven jail after being found drifting off the American coast.

This mostly dour film even finds some much-needed levity from a sequence in which the jailed slaves peer at grim-looking, hymn-singing abolitionists wailing outside the bars and wonder whether they're supposed to be the entertainment.

But despite such moments and fine acting by the likes of Matthew McConaughey as a young property lawyer who eagerly takes on the case of the mutinous slaves, a great amount of Amistad's more than 21/2-hour running time is taken up by three trials. In effect, they're actually the same trial told three times in three separate courtrooms, as the slaves' case rises to the Supreme Court.

By the time we land in the Supreme Court (a scene which, oddly enough, all but ignores the imposing vaulted ceiling built for it at the Sonalysts Studios in Waterford, Conn.) and hear Anthony Hopkins's dramatic "look, Ma, I'm acting" anti-slavery speech -- in which he even pulls in a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence -- I'm afraid much of the audience will either be asleep or out the door. The speech and the justices' ultimate decision are, by this time, anti-climactic.

Transformations hit home

Yet there are splendid things in Amistad, not the least of which are the transformations of Newport's Queen Anne and Washington squares into mid-19th-century New Haven and the State House in Providence into a blindingly white Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Some of the flashback moments aboard the slave ship are unnerving in the way they depict the horrors of slavery, especially a powerful sequence in which 50 slaves are shackled together by a long chain to a sack of rocks and sent sliding over the sides of the ship because the crew had underestimated the food supply needed for a long voyage.

This sequence, which features full frontal nudity, may be Amistad's major misstep because it may well eliminate school group sales in this R-rated film, which also features gruesome violence. (In America, violence is tolerated, but nudity is taboo.) And school groups seem to be the prime audience for this well-meaning but slow-moving epic.

On the minus side, when the slaves finally mutiny after long weeks at sea and meals consisting of just a spoonful of porridge, some of the men look as though they've spent a month at a spa and are ready to enter the Mr. Universe contest.

Political victims

Besides the courtroom histrionics, Amistad shows how the slaves suffered at the hands of political expedience. President Martin Van Buren, played as a dithering bumbler by Nigel Hawthorne, fears that he won't be reelected unless he kowtows to Southerners and puts the slaves back in irons. Queen Isabella II of Spain, played for ongoing comic relief as an infantile ninny by Anna Paquin, wants the slaves returned as "Spanish property." The two Spanish survivors of the shipboard massacre want the slaves and the ship returned to them. The U.S. Navy sailors who discovered the ship floundering at sea want salvage rights to the vessel -- and its human cargo.

It's these greedy concerns that set the plot in motion. Despite Hopkins's attempts to make the most of his role as the aging and righteous former President John Quincy Adams, arguing eloquently for freedom as a cute but slightly absentminded professor, most of the large cast is at sea. Morgan Freeman, as a former slave turned abolitionist, is surprisingly bland.

Among the best is Matthew McConaughey, so awful in Contact, but redeeming himself here as the lawyer who eagerly shepherds the slave's case with wit and guile through the rocky shoals of the various courts. Although McConaughey seems at first, with teensy wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose, to be creating a caricature rather than a character, he comes up with a moving, strongminded individual.

Also memorable is Pete Postlethwaite as the chief prosecutor who represents the U.S. government's case against the Africans. Smart and quick and devious and willing to brook no sympathy for the Africans, he's the character you love to hate in Amistad.

Hounsou steals the show

Yet, stealing the picture from all these other more accomplished actors is Djimon Hounsou, a former French model born in West Africa, who plays the leader of the slave revolt, Cinque.

Hounsou does it with barely a word of English, most of his dialogue being translated in subtitles. Powerful, resolute, determined and proud, he's an elegant hero who suffers for a system not of his own making or wishes.

It's he who really pulls us into Amistad and portrays it in human terms. He needs no embellishments. But characteristically, Spielberg, always the sentimentalist, shamelessly has Hansou shed a single tear at critical moments -- twice!

Like much of Amistad, it's overkill.

***

Amistad

Starring : Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, David Paymer, Pete Postlethwaite, Stellan Skarsgard, Razaaq Adoti, Abu Bakaar Fofanah, Anna Paquin.

Producers: A DreamWorks SKG picture written by David Franzoni, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Rated : R, contains violence, nudity.

Running time: 155 minutes.

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