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.