Amistad
Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, Stellan Skarsgard, Nigel Hawthorne, Pete Postlewaite and Anthony Hopkins
Review by Norm Dixon
Steven Spielberg's $75 million Amistad is really two films. The first is the inspiring and heroic story of a revolt by enslaved Africans that has, until now, been largely ignored by establishment historians.
It celebrates and vindicates the right of the oppressed to win their freedom by any means necessary, including insurrection.
It graphically portrays the horror and the terrible toll of the "middle passage". It forces audiences to confront, and perhaps later discuss and explore, the cruel legacy of slavery on Africa, the African diaspora and the societies whose foundations were built upon it.
The second Amistad — about two-thirds of the film — is a slow-paced courtroom drama in which history has been cynically falsified. Its motive is to convince viewers that injustice and racial oppression can be done away with within the system.
Most progressive reviewers have chosen to concentrate on the first Amistad, mimicking the curate's famous assessment of his egg ("good in parts"). Conservative commentators are not as reluctant to evaluate the whole film. Historian George Will, a proponent of the "great men" school of history, declared that there are two heroes in the movie: Joseph Cinque, the leader of the revolt, and the US legal system.
Amistad tells of the 1839 revolt aboard the grotesquely misnamed slave ship La Amistad ("Friendship"). The revolt's leader, Singbe Pieh (Djimon Hounsou), named Joseph Cinque by the Spanish slavers, pries loose a nail with bloodied fingers and frees 53 other Africans.
In a brief but bloody skirmish, all but two of the slavers are killed. Cinque orders the ship back to Africa, but the Spaniards instead steer it north. The ship is seized by a US warship off New York, and the Africans are taken to Connecticut, where they are jailed awaiting trial.
The abolitionist movement, represented by Christian business person Lewis Tappan (Skarsgard) and well-off former slave Theodore Joadson (Freeman), hire the opportunist real estate lawyer Roger Baldwin (McConaughey), who successfully defends the Africans in a state court.
US President Martin Van Buren (Hawthorne) attempts to curry favour in the slaveholding south by appealing the case to the Supreme Court. Cantankerous 73-year-old former president John Quincy Adams (Hopkins) joins Baldwin and, in an eccentrically eloquent monologue, wins over the southerner-dominated court. The Supreme Court sets the Africans free in March 1841.
As Eric Foner, the distinguished professor of history at Columbia University, has pointed out, the Amistad case left the legal edifice supporting slavery in the US untouched. Not a single slave in the US went free as a result.
The case revolved around whether the captives aboard La Amistad were legally or illegally enslaved, not whether slavery was right or wrong. International treaties signed in the early 1800s made transportation of Africans to the new world as slaves illegal.
Foner told US National Public Radio: "There were some who wanted to end the African slave trade so they could make more profit by selling their own slaves within the US ... Slavery in the US was widely defended. It was entrenched in the constitution. It was defended by the laws, by the government. You could condemn the African slave trade and strongly support slavery in the United States."
Spielberg whitewashes this institutional complicity with the slave system, and paints the US courts of the time as impartial and independent.
The central lie of the movie is that the case was won by appeals for the recognition of human beings' innate right to freedom.
Explains Foner: "... the Supreme Court had no interest in morality, justice and freedom when it came to African-Americans. In fact, a majority of those justices were still on the Supreme Court in 1857, when they ruled that a black person had no rights that a white man was bound to respect."
To reinforce the theme of moral awakening, lawyer Roger Baldwin is portrayed as a young, bumbling and selfish upstart who sees the light and is won over by the inherent justice of the Africans' cry for freedom. In truth, Baldwin was about 50 and a respected ruling-class lawyer who fought the case on the only basis that the courts would accept — maritime law, treaty law and property law.
Among other facts overlooked or manipulated: it is never revealed that slavery was legal in Connecticut at the time; Cinque was not present in the Supreme Court when the verdict came down but shackled in New England; John Quincy Adams, described "as neither a supporter nor an opponent of slavery", during his time in office allowed slavery to flourish and obstructed British Navy raids on slave ships; Cinque never visited Adams' home; the Supreme Court's decision affirmed that slaves were property, the Amistad Africans being set free because they were not slaves; to exaggerate the triumph of Adams' liberal appeals, the film claims that seven of the nine Supreme Court judges were southern slave-owners when, in fact, five were from the south and four were slaveholders.
Amistad's makers dismiss mass movements and organisations of the oppressed as factors in historical change, in favour of the view that individual "heroes" make history.
The abolitionists financed the Africans' defence, and used the victory to win many new supporters. Spielberg slanders them as a small band of Christian fundamentalist eccentrics.
Tappan, a leading abolitionist, is made out to be a snivelling hypocrite when he simpers, "Maybe it'd be better for us if the Amistad captives lose their case. We'll get more publicity if they're put back into slavery."
The role of African-American abolitionists is fudged. Morgan Freeman's character, Joadson, is entirely fictional. The film does not include any of the black abolitionists who were involved in the movement. The inclusion of these characters would have made the film dramatically richer.
Freeman spends much of the film looking bemused and powerless. As Foner points out, "This is regrettable because blacks were central actors in abolitionism ... it was the first racially integrated political movement in US history."
While the feat of the Amistad rebels was inspiring and is deserving of its rightful place in history, for Hollywood's film moguls it is politically non-threatening and much easier to manipulate. As Dr Henry Louis Gates, a professor in the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard and one of the film's advisers, observes, "The bad guys are vanquished at the end, and the good guys are able to sail home and live happily ever after". Thanks to the US courts, no less.
The Amistad mutiny was not the only slave rebellion in the US. Historian Herbert Aptheker counted more than 200 plots, conspiracies and open rebellions in the US between the early 17th century and the Civil War. Few of the leaders involved fared as well as Cinque and his rebels did before the US courts.
The leaders of the three major uprisings — Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831 — were all executed after being tried by US courts. In Florida, runaway slaves joined forces with the Seminole Indians to fight the US army, navy and marines for almost 40 years until 1858. Washington spent $40 million and lost 1600 soldiers.
Each of these would make a thrilling Hollywood epic, but don't hold your breath waiting.