After the relative disappointment of The Lost World, which was at best too light and fluffy to be of any
real quality so the director took his eye off the ball, or at worst a cynical
cash in, Spielberg got serious. Amistad is one of the rare Spielberg
films that I hadn’t previously seen before embarking on this insane project,
and while it’s certainly not one I’ll be reaching for on a Saturday night, it’s
important, handsome and well performed. It sits comfortably alongside Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Bridge
Of Spies, Munich, and Lincoln as one of his ‘morality in
immoral times’ films.
Amistad tells the
1839 story of a mutiny aboard the titular slave ship and the subsequent legal
battle over the ownership of the people on board, and therefore the morality of
ownership of a person in the context of pre-Revolutionary America. Djimon Hounsou is on force-of-nature form as
Sengbe Pieh, leader of the mutiny and figurehead of the legal case. It’s a little patronising that he’s pretty
much the only of the ‘slave’ population considered intelligent enough to speak
at the trial, but Spielberg telegraphs the drama away from such concerns with a
focus on how awful slavery was.
There are strong performances across the board, with a post-A Time To Kill, pre-rom-com apocalypse
Matthew McConaughey showing good form and Anthony Hopkins turning in what we
now know to be a pretty standard ‘elder statesman’ performance as former
president John Quincy Adams. Oscar
nominated at the time, Hopkins is impressive in his impassioned grandstanding,
but as courtroom performances go, it’s no better than, say, Kevin Costner in JFK or McConaughey himself in A Time To Kill. Hounsou is the star, his rage and humanity
battling beneath the surface throughout.
No sensible person should need to have the fact that slavery
was awful spelled out for them but Spielberg does an admirable job of
highlighting the horrors. We don’t feel
remotely bad about the crewmen being murdered by the slaves; we celebrate the
freed slaves’ victories; we feel incredulous at their treatment. It’s such an obvious subject that the whole
thing feels a little forced, but there’s skill in the telling of the story. It’s easily slotted into the Spielberg canon
alongside Lincoln as one of his
well-meaning but preaching-to-the-choir films.
Yes, you don’t need to hear a passionate argument against slavery in The
Land Of The Free, but sometimes passion gets you a lot way.
His career in danger of drying up somewhat in the years
post-Schindler’s List, 1999 saw
Spielberg rediscover his mojo with Saving
Private Ryan. Holding a special
place in my heart as one of the films I remember seeing at Newcastle’s beautiful
Odeon cinema before it closed, Ryan
marks Spielberg’s 4th collaboration with cinematographer Janusz
Kaminski, but the first time Kaminski’s influence was really as great as that
of the director.
Wrongly criticised for being a dull film bookended by two memorable
actions sequences, Ryan’s style became
the ubiquitous in WW2 films: imitated but never equalled, the brothers-in-arms quality
of the roughly-drawn characters just enough to keep things interesting and make
you care about them, and the shaky-camera style nothing short of visceral. I started Mission: Imposspielberg to remind
myself of how I felt about his films years after I first saw them, and I’m
happy to report that Ryan has lost
none of its power.
The Omaha beach sequence rightly hogged the headlines back
in 1999. As brutal as anything Spielberg
has shot before or since, this depiction of the hell of war is heart-in-mouth
stuff. Named characters, led by Tom
Hanks’ everyman Cap. Miller, are thrown into the breach on the beach, allowing
us to see just enough of them as countless others are slain around them. Ed Burns’ bland Noo Yawker, Giovanni Ribisi’s
moral medic, Barry Pepper’s memorable sniper, and Tom Sizemore’s indestructible
grunt are all introduced with the narrative economy befitting an ensemble war
movie, all the while chaos reigns around them.
The Brothers In Arms road movie format works well, Matt
Damon’s Ryan an increasingly inaccessible MacGuffin (‘Saving Major MacGuffin’,
presumably a rejected early draft), while a fine supporting cast (including Ted
Danson, Paul Giamatti, Dennis Farina) help to ease things along. It all builds, of course, to a stunning
climactic battle, with a seriously tooled-up German battalion attacking an
under-staffed U.S. Army outpost. Ryan
earns his stripes and the respect of the cast, Damon doing good work and, a
rising star at the time, well cast as the dutiful GI.
Spielberg’s visual invention is unleashed throughout, but it’s
the quiet, subtle moments rather than the grandiose battle scenes that steal
the thunder. A reflection in the window
as a military procession arrives at Mrs. Ryan’s house, a captured German troop
digging his own grave in silhouette; these are the moments that give the film
heart, as well as Tom Hanks’ restrained performance. His first collaboration with Spielberg, his humanity
grounds the film (in a way that, say, Brad Pitt in Fury doesn’t), allowing the quirks of the ensemble cast do their
thing, and reminding us that there’s a real person in the middle of the horror.
This is one of my favourite Spielberg films and watching it
again after a good few years just reminds me of why. It absolutely nails everything a war movie
should have: a great ensemble cast (like Cross
Of Iron, or The Great Escape),
dehumanising horrors (The Big Red One,
Full Metal Jacket), but a strong
human core (Paths Of Glory, The Deer Hunter). Spielberg’s often maligned, occasionally twee
tendency towards soft-focus Hollywood-isms meets his sometimes-seen penchant
for the visceral headlong and the results are rightly Oscar-winning.
