Not bad, but an unsubtle ending

Rating: 7/10 (12 December 2006)

The case of "La Amistad" marked an important development in the separation of the U.S. executive and judiciary; and almost incidentally was also a key development in the onset of civil war and the eventual abolition of slavery. The case considered whether a group of slaves captured in Africa, who had revolted while on board a ship in U.S. waters, should be given freedom, at a time when the U.S. law stated that only those born as slaves could be treated as tradeable commodities. The legal case was clear, but giving preference to a group of Africans over white Europeans and Americans was politically dangerous, although in the end, the prisoners were freed.
The genius of Stephen Spielberg's film of the case is the way that in the beginning, he presents the Africans to us as they would have appeared to the Americans of that time: animal and threatening, and forces us to see how "civilised" men might have regarded them as of another species altogether (although of course, even accepting this does not lead to a real argument for the cruelty of their treatment). But as the two sides learn to communicate, so the humanity of the slaves is revealed, both within and without the film. The weak points are a score that over-emphasises the film's message, and the strange role played by the character of John Quincey Adams, a former president who became involved in the case. For the first three quarters of the film, the story is that of a young lawyer, at first cynical, later increasingly committed to the cause, who builds the correct legal case for freedom. But when the case goes before the Supremene Court, Adams steps in, and makes a windy and completely unlegalistic appeal for the men's freedom on the simple grounds that slavery is wrong. I know nothing of the true history, but if this really happened, I (if I were the writer) would have taken it out, because it breaks the nuanced pattern of the story to date; but one fears it has been included for precisely that reason, to allow the movie to wear its heart on its sleeve. It's a shame that Spielberg felt the need to tell us so explicitly that slavery is wrong.
The events depicted happened when the United States was only recently divorced from Britain, and a number of British actors play certain key figures without disguising their accents, including Anthony Hopkins as Adams and the late Nigel Hawthorne (good value as always) as his successor van Buren.