A historically-significant film that every American should see - at least twice.

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2000)

I'm not a student of history so I have no idea how accurate the screenplay is for the movie, "Amistad", however since it is a Spielberg film I suspect that it is mainly fact with a little fiction filling some of the question marks. It does represent a real incident in 1839.
I rate this film a very stong 9 of 10. Directed by Spielberg, with music by John Williams, and spot-on acting by everyone, it tells the story of the Amistad ship of west Africans taken illegally to the USA. During the journey they manage to sieze the ship, killing several of the crew in the process. Even though they try to go directly back to Africa, they end up in Massachusetts and are imprisoned for murder and other crimes.
Problem is, no one locally can understand their language, and they cannot understand English. Learning to communicate is one of the challenges. However, the biggest challenge facing the Africans is a biased America which fears that a decision to free them would result in a civil war over the slavery issue.
As we now know, the civil war did break out, but it is not entirely clear how much the Amistad incident influenced it. No matter, that's not the value of the movie.
What you see in colonial America are people with some of the same attitudes their ancestors fled to originally settle America. A satisfying conclusion to the Amistad incident depends upon a realization by the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, that a man's freedom is his inalienable right, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and that this applies to black Africans as well as it does to white settlers.
To me there is no doubt that Sir Anthony Hopkins' performance as former president John Quincy Adams is the most remarkable of all. He has a lenghty monologue, near the end of the film, delivered to the Supreme Court justices, and not one second of that scene is dull or boring. Every time I hear it, and bear in mind its meaning to all of us, it chokes me up. I was also pleasantly surprised at how good young actor Matthew McConaughey was as the young lawyer who represented the catives.
Perhaps the most touching scene was between two of the captives, in their prison quarters. One of them had been given a bible by townsfolk, and of course he could not read it. However, he had been looking at the pictures, probably for weeks, and in their own language he basically explained, through the pictures, what he had figured out of the New Testament. In his explanation, he showed his imprisoned friend how thier plight, being imprisoned for false reasons, and now facing death, so closely paralled what had happened to Christ. To me that was a key scene to show that these Africans even surpassed most of the "Americans" in reasoning and depth of feeling, while they were being mistreated because they were thought to be an inferior species. That may have just been good script-writing, but to me it was a powerful revelation in the film.
I always prefer a well-made film based on real life, and Amistad will go down as one of my favorites, and that 2-hour film can teach most of us more about American history than any amount of reading can do.