Amistad has a blistering good opening. First of all, it has NO PROLOGUE — no map, no scrolling text, no deep voice informing us of the historical background, explaining the trade routes of the Caribbean or the complex political situations of 19th-century Sierra Leone.

What does Spielberg do instead? He gives us a man in a situation. No, wait, he makes it even simpler. He gives us a nail, some fingers, and some eyes. The fingers and eyes belong to Cinque, we will learn, and we come upon him in his decisive moment. We discover Cinque as he is engaged in the easily-described physical task of removing the nail that attaches his chains to the deck of the ship. But wait, no, for the first few minutes we don’t even know Cinque is on a ship, there’s just him and the nail — his eyes, his fingers, his chains and the nail. This is great cinema, people. The lighting tells us it’s night, in a thunderstorm, and the sound eventually tells us it’s a ship, but all we get at first is the eyes, the fingers, the chains and the nail. The scene states Cinque’s problem in the simplest, most immediately physical terms possible: he is in chains and he’s nailed to the deck of a ship. Who would watch a movie about a man nailed to the deck of a ship and not want the man to free himself?

Once Cinque gets that long, long nail out, he undoes his chains, frees his fellow captives and leads a mutiny on board the Amistad (how ironic that amistad is almost amity, the island from Jaws? Both words mean “friendship”). The mutiny is fiercely ugly and violent — Spielberg does not hold back on Cinque’s rage — and the nail of the previous scene is replaced with a sword in the second. Spielberg seems to be saying that the simple action of removing a nail can develop, in the blink of an eye, into armed insurrection against an unjust state.

Spielberg makes an interesting choice in this opening sequence: the mutiny is carried out in a barrage of foreign languages, Mende (which is what Cinque speaks) vs Spanish (which is what the ship’s crew speaks). Spielberg makes the decision to subtitle the Spanish lines but leaves the Mende untranslated. So suddenly, the protagonist we so dearly identified with is made harsh and unknowable, while we’re allowed in on the thoughts of the Spanish-speaking crew. I’m guessing Spielberg’s goal is not to distance us from Cinque but to keep the scene historically accurate (the sequence is, in large part, about the miscommunication between the crew and the captives), to give us a sense of the times, where there might be Africans and Spanish and English and Americans all in the same waters, or even all on the same ship. But the result is distancing — we’re outside of the protagonist.

Still, the opening 17 minutes are stunning, and completely without any meaningful dialogue. The opening is what Spielberg does best, pure action describing a straightforward process: how does one kill a shark from a sinking boat, how does one welcome a fleet of flying saucers, how does one clear a city of its Jews, how does one go from being a bound captive to being the captain of a hijacked vessel? And then what does one do, once that vessel in in one’s control, but one has no sailing experience? This sequence, and the one in Act III describing Cinque’s kidnapping and transport, his journey through the slave trade, form the heart of Amistad and are its most successful passages.

Later on, when Cinque and his fellows are behind bars, we are treated to subtitles for their lines, as they give comic interpretations of white New England culture. Now Spielberg wants us on Cinque’s side again, wants us to see dour, prissy New Haven as Cinque sees it. This helps us identify with Cinque again, but it also presents the cliche of the “noble savage,” the innocent who knows more than the civilized. This problem comes up several times in Amistad, as Spielberg grants us and witholds from us subtitles for Cinque’s lines as he sees fit. In one scene we’ll be in his head, but in the next scene he’s opaque and unknowable, a genuine savage.

The other cliche that runs through Amistad is the “noble white liberal” performing the task of freeing the oppressed black man. Just as Cry Freedom tells the story of Steven Biko through the eyes of a white journalist and Mississippi Burning tells the story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of a pair of white FBI agents, Amistad spends a lot of its time worrying about the travails of the well-meaning white people who want Cinque to go free. Cinque gets demoted from “protagonist” to “inspiration,” and narrowly escapes becoming a “symbol.” Spielberg tries to get around this cliche by tempering it with complication — the lawyer isn’t an idealist, he’s just a property-rights lawyer doing his job, the ex-president is a cranky old man, the crusading Christian is more concerned with his political agenda than with the life of his client — but it makes the narrative work harder than it needs to and, again, distances us from the protagonist.

Amistad‘s genre is the courtroom drama, a form given to long speeches and dialogue-heavy confrontations, things that aren’t a natural fit for Spielberg, even more so when his protagonist cannot speak. After the pure action of the slave-trade scenes, the next most effective sequences are the ones dealing directly with Baldwin’s attempts to communicate with Cinque. In order to win Cinque’s case, Baldwin needs to know him, and as Cinque comes into focus, a fully dimensional human being appears, neither noble savage nor innocent victim, but a specific individual, different from his fellows but worlds away from his captors, placed into a ridiculous, unwinnable situation. As Cinque comes into focus to us, Cinque’s situation comes into focus for him. By Act V he reveals himself, through his interpreter, to be savvy, highly intelligent and articulate. He shows that he understands the legal process, the nature of the trial and the use of metaphor — but he still has to sit out the climax of his own movie while an old white man makes a flowery speech on his behalf.

ACT I (0:00-28:00) Cinque and his fellow slaves break free of their bonds and take over the Amistad, the in which ship they’re being transported. They kill most of the crew and try to sail the ship to Africa. They wind up, instead, in New Haven. This causes an international incident and a court case with multiple suits ensues, with many different parties asserting a claim to the ship and its cargo: the Queen of Spain, an English salvage crew, and the surviving crew members all believe they have right of ownership. An abolitionist group, led by a fellow named Tappan, wants to see Cinque and his mates used as an example of the immorality of slavery. A lowly property-rights lawyer named Baldwin offers his services to Tappan and is rebuffed.

ACT II (28:00-1:00:00) Tappan and Theodore Joadson, a freed slave who works with him, go to Washington to see ex-president John Quincy Adams, who is in his declining years. Tappan and Joadson ask Adams to take up Cinque’s cause and he refuses. Tappan and Joadson, out of options, go back to Baldwin, who suggests that the case cannot be one as a moral crusade, but has a strong basis as a straight property dispute. Baldwin tries to find out where exactly Cinque and his fellows are from and gets nowhere fast. After a little detective work, Baldwin and Joadson find that while the Amistad is a ship from Cuba, Cinque and the others are from Africa, transferred after a sale from a illegal slave-trade ship. It seems like the case is all wrapped up when president Martin Van Buren, under pressure from southern forces, replaces the court’s judge with his own hand-picked choice.

ACT III (1:00:00-1:34:00) Joadson goes to ask Adams for help again, and Adams again refuses, but gives him some advice anyway — to find out Cinque’s story and present that to the court. Baldwin and Joadson locate a black sailor who speaks Cinque’s language and learns his story. We learn that Cinque was the village hero, who killed a lion single-handedly. The centerpiece of the movie is a fifteen-minute setpiece illustrating Cinque’s journey from contented village hero in Africa to wild-eyed mutineer in New Haven. This story is recounted to the court with its new judge, at the end of which Cinque stands up and says, in halting English, “Give us free!”

ACT IV (1:34:00-2:00:00) With their judge seemingly disposed against them, Cinque and his fellows start to give up hope. His best friend becomes a Christian, and Tappan admits that Cinque might be better for the cause of Abolition if he’s killed. Then, surprisingly, the new judge finds for Cinque and there is much rejoicing. Ordinarily, this would be an act break all in itself, but there is more story to be told: Van Buren is, again, pressured by the South to get the desired result, and Van Buren has the court’s verdict appealed to the Supreme Court. Cinque is enraged, wants to know what kind of place America is, where ideals are espoused but not practiced. Baldwin appeals to Adams again, and this time he takes the case.

ACT V: Cinque and Adams prepare their case for the Supreme Court. Adams, who has lived all his life in his father’s famous shadow, sees the case as a chance to make his own mark on American history. Adams delivers a long speech to the Supreme Court, the court, against long odss, agrees with him, and Cinque and his fellows go free and venture back to Africa. In case the movie had not been heavy enough, subtitles inform us that Cinque returned to his village to find that, in his absence, his family had been sold into slavery.

There is a lot of excellent filmmaking in Amistad, and yet there’s also something oddly stodgy and club-footed about it, and I keep coming back to this central problem of its paralyzed protagonist and its tag-team structure. Every time Cinque is allowed to speak for himself the movie comes alive, but when the movie stops to examine the central issue from other points of view it gets subdued and sancitmonious. It almost seems as though Spielberg, who triumphed so brilliantly with his Holocaust movie, felt a need to treat his Slavery movie with kid gloves. Wartime Poland in Schindler is a lively, complicated place with good people in all camps and a lot of moral ambiguity. The bad guys in Amistad are bad, bad, bad, sneering racists and glowering autocrats, childish leaders and gimlet-eyed power seekers. Joadson is an interesting character, but he’s also a passive protagonist, he’s either tagging along with Tappan, or tagging along with Baldwin or getting told off by Adams. Baldwin is an interesting character and the most Spielbergian of the bunch, a real “stand-it-on-its-head” kind of character, a pragmatist in a story of ideals, but his story conks out at the end of the end of Act IV. Adams is an interesting character but he’s used as some kind of secret weapon: “If only we could get John Quincy Adams to try this case, by god, we couldn’t lose!” From the moment he takes the case we know the outcome is in the bag, and the climax of the movie drags as a result.

And yet, I can see the rationale for the decisions made. Spielberg figured out that the way to make a Holocaust movie is to make it not about the Suffering Jews but about a guy who wants to open an enamelware factory. In Amistad he makes his protagonist a Suffering Slave and then he’s got nowhere to go; it’s endemic to the character’s situation that he’s unable to act. It’s as though he’d made Schindler’s List from Good Jew Stern’s point of view.

That’s enough for now, tomorrow I’ll go through the narrative in detail and sort out some of these issues.