Solid fact-based legal story

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2000)

Well-done legal story, using strong performances to tell a compelling story. Not as emotionally gripping or moving as "Schindler's List," but Spielberg does a better job this time of telling the story of the victims - here the slaves - than he did in his Oscar-winning Holocaust epic, which so obscured the identity of the Jews that I couldn't tell them apart (except for the Ben Kingsley character, and maybe the maid).
Here, Spielberg explores the slaves with a ten-minute opening sequence that depicts the bloody 1839 uprising aboard the ironically named Spanish slave ship La Amistad (it means friendship). In addition, the depiction of the "middle crossing" is a great piece of filmmaking: the 15 some-odd minutes, right in the middle of the film, are seen in flashback, and they are pure, gripping cinema. Cinque (played by Djimon Hounsou), the slave who led the uprising, tells the brutal story of his abduction and sale into slavery, and when he speaks passionately of the inhuman conditions onboard the ship that brought him to the New World, he invests the story with a human quality that the more restrained "List" didn't.
Unfortunately, Spielberg's efforts to construct the legal case fail resoundingly. Much of the problem lies in the nature of the raw material. The Amistad rebels want only to return to Africa, but are betrayed by their Spanish navigators and wind up in the U.S. There they're put on trial for murder and thrust into the middle of a thorny political and philosophical debate with far-reaching implications for the already-fragile union between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states.
Somehow, the trial court judge and jury are dismissed by President Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) - how this is done is never addressed, and that is a major failing in a film that purports to tell the story of the Amistad as essentially a story of jurisprudence: a textbook illustration of the way the American legal system can, even under inauspicious circumstances, sometimes do exactly what it's meant to do. So just how does the head of the executive branch dismiss a member of an independent judiciary?
Moreover, the case begins - quite rightly - as a property case, but somehow turns into a human rights issue. What happened to the winning property rights arguments along the way is never quite explained.