There's a moment in Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" that captures what's so right and so wrong about the movie.
The film's main protagonists, John Quincy Adams and Cinque, the African leader of a slave-ship uprising, are locked in intimate conversation. As Cinque tells the former president about how he empowers himself by summoning his ancestors, the personal meaning for Adams is painfully etched on his face. Words aren't necessary.
It's a great scene and could easily have been left at that. But Spielberg insists on taking the two men to Adams' greenhouse, where the statesman shows his visitor his prize African violet. Does it come as any surprise that the music swells just about now?
It's classic Spielberg, who brings his worst and his best to bear on "Amistad," his fictionalized account of the Amistad incident. Shot through with Spielbergian sentimental touches and lacking the central human element that made "Schindler's List" such a fascinating personal as well as historical drama, "Amistad" nonetheless manages to make its enormous impact simply by bringing a fabulous story to light.
"Amistad" also reveals the democratic process at its most righteously triumphant, which makes it ideal fodder for a director whose compulsion to wring redemption out of hopeless stories neatly dovetails with the most idealistic strains of the American character.
"Amistad" begins with brutal force as a desperate man, shown in harrowing flashes of lightning, tries to break free from his shackles. The man is Sengbe Pieh, who had been captured from his West African village by Spanish slavers and transported to Cuba.
While en route from Havana to another port on a ship called La Amistad, Sengbe -- called Cinque by his kidnappers -- frees himself and leads 52 fellow Africans in an uprising that kills all but two crew members. The Africans order the crewmen to take them back to Africa, but the sailors instead steer the boat northward.
The Amistad is discovered by a U.S. Naval ship, and the Africans are imprisoned in Connecticut and charged with murder. Their case winds up in the Supreme Court, where Adams argues on their behalf.
Most of "Amistad" has to do with the Africans' imprisonment and protracted legal fights. Taken up by abolitionist Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard) and Theodore Joadson (a fictional character played by Morgan Freeman), the Africans' case is eventually taken on by real-estate lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), who perceives the case as a classic property-rights issue.
