Spielberg: Amistad part 2

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Amistad has five acts with a free/captive theme running through. In Act I, Cinque frees his fellows and is then taken captive, in Act II, a number of people conspire to free Cinque, only to have the judge deciding the case replaced by the president. In Act III it is proven, through much diligence and hard work, that Cinque was captured and held illegally, but in Act IV the president acts once again, throwing out the court’s decision and forcing the case to the Supreme Court, where Cinque’s case finally triumphs. In 1997, the idea of a president gaming the court system, obstructing due process in order to achieve the verdict he desires in the face of a clear-cut injustice, was one an audience could cheerfully smirk at — oh, that wacky Martin Van Buren, what a jerk, what a loser. Ahem.

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.

Comments

17 Responses to “Spielberg: Amistad part 2”
  1. Anonymous says:

    Your analysis is a real lesson in screenwriting. Do you know if any of the critics made this point when the movie came out?
    –Ed.

    • Todd says:

      I don’t remember that being the case. Some critics noted the “political correctness,” and some noted that the courtroom drama was dry, but most critics, as you can imagine, don’t really have the time to take a narrative apart on a deadline. And let’s not forget, the story of the Amistad was brand new to just about everybody in 1997, a lot of the critical reaction was surprise that anyone was telling this story at all.

  2. stormwyvern says:

    The choice to subtitle the Spanish rather than the Mende in the mutiny scene sounds rather baffling. If his purpose is in fact to stay historically accurate and show how the language barrier caused misunderstanding between the two sides which probably worsened a situation that was already beyond tense, how does subtitling the Spanish do a better job of that than subtitling the dialogue of our protagonist would have? I think the simplest thing would have been to subtitle all the dialogue, but make it clear from what’s actually being said that neither group actually understands the other. There could even be a visual cue, like a different color of text representing each language, to drive home the message that we’re the only ones who fully understand what’s going on. I wonder if it would have been possible to do something where you have one group speaking in English and the other speaking the historically accurate language, then provide some visual indication like a different camera angle that the POV has switched and switch to the second group speaking English and the first being impossible for the audience to understand. I think it would be interesting, but probably not all that doable. Speaking of which, I thought your idea for a film where Cinque is speaking perfect English and the Americans speak a foreign language the audience doesn’t understand would have made for a fascinating movie, but would probably scare off any number of actors from filling the roles that are not Cinque.

    • Todd says:

      I think what Spielberg wants to do in the opening sequence is keep the cinema as pure as possible while still allowing us to follow the action — we have to pick up that Cinque wants to go back to Africa (which the boat, to be fair to the Spanish, isn’t designed to do) and the Spaniards deceive him into thinking they’re doing his will. I don’t know how much of that would get across without subtitles, but then again I’m not sure how much needs to — we can tell that Cinque wants to go one way and the Spaniards want to go another, and in a few minutes they wind up in New Haven.

      • stormwyvern says:

        OK, I think I understand a little better now. We can get that Cinque wants to get back to Africa without necessarily understanding everything he says, but we’re unlikely to understand that the Spanish sailors are not actually going back to Africa unless we can understand what they’re saying. Still, I think the whole scene could have been subtitled without losing the idea that the language barrier is playing a role here.

        • Todd says:

          I say, leave out the subtitles throughout and if people are confused, have someone explain it later — it wouldn’t have been that hard to put the “which way are we going” deception into a later line of dialogue.

    • Anonymous says:

      language

      That reminds me of The Passion of the Christ: Mel Gibson originally planned to leave the dialogue, in Latin and Aramaic, completely untranslated.
      –Ed.

      • Todd says:

        Re: language

        That’s absurd — no one would have any idea what was going on.

        • Re: language

          For that matter, as you’ve recently mentioned Dark Crystal, in that film the Skeksis didn’t originally speak English at all, just a made-up hissy language, and everything going on with them was apparently perfectly understandable through the puppeteering alone (which was what Henson wanted) – there was a deluxe laserdisk release at one point that had two of the scenes in extended roughcut form that showed it worked just fine, but a preview audience or two, while actually getting what was going on, got frustrated about “not knowing what they were saying,” so lines were dubbed in for them (and a lot of other things were cut and the prologue was added).

          I wonder how far you can go with a USA (or any, I suppose) audience in having all the characters speak a language they don’t for an extended period of time with no translation, even if the story is intelligible, without irritating or angering them . . .

          • Anonymous says:

            Re: language

            “No one ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of the American public.” ~ P.T. Barnum

            If the storytelling is done well, you can go a damned long time without ever having intelligible dialogue. The most recent example would obviously be WALL*E, but thinking back, it was done well in Castaway, too. I suppsoe the difference between those and what you’re talkign about, though, is that there’s no dialogue there at all, not simply dialogue that the audience knows is occurring, but that they cannot understand. Understanding the needs of the audience, even when what they think they need is wrong, has got to be frustrating for writers of all types.

            • Anonymous says:

              Re: language

              Viewers get frustrated not because they’re not intelligent, but because they are intelligent. As humans, we’re wired to decipher language and generally will ignore other visual cues in favor of puzzling out verbal ones. (The classic example is an experiment in which people are shown a rapid succession of the names of colors printed in different colors — e.g., the word “blue” printed in red. When asked to name the color they see, nearly everyone responds by reading the word instead.) This makes a scene without any dialogue much easier to watch than a scene with dialogue you can’t understand.
              –Ed.

            • stormwyvern says:

              Re: language

              To be fair to the hypothetical audience, the use of a foreign language without subtitles for an extended period of time can create a weird disconnect from the movie. If the Skeksis in the example from above had ended up speaking in their own language, it would have called into question whose point of view we were supposed to be viewing the scene from. After all, most of the scenes with the Skeksis don’t include any Gelflings or other characters who aren’t Skeksis, And if we’re in the role of omniscient observer, then we should be able to understand any laguague thrown at us.

              I think it would have been interesting if they had compromised and had the Skeksis speak English in the scenes where the Gelflings weren’t around, but speak their own language when another race was present, though audiences still might not have caught on to the idea.

        • stormwyvern says:

          Re: language

          to be fair to Mel Gibson, I think he could (and as I understand – since i haven’t seen the film – did) assume that everyone in the audience already knew the story. How much does the dialogue add to beat, beat, stab, stab, crucify, dead?

  3. swan_tower says:

    Picking up my devil’s-advocate role again, re prologues: you don’t really need to tell American audiences anything for them to fill in the context of the slave-trade. We’re piss-poor on the details, but we understand the general shape of it the minute you show us a ship full of chained black people.

    • Todd says:

      Ah, but Amistad takes place in 1839, thirty years after the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished. The specific legal status of Cinque — kidnapped in Africa, shipped out of Sierra Leone, brought to Cuba, sold to Cubans and making it to New Haven — is unique and complicated, and it’s the reason why the Amistad case quickly became an international cause celebre. And I’m guessing a less powerful director would have been instructed by the studio to put a prologue up front to explain the situation. The fact that Cinque had been transported illegally from Sierra Leone to Cuba is the linchpin of his case.

      Instead of giving us that information in a prologue, Spielberg does the best he can to put us in Cinque’s shoes, having his legal status be almost as confusing to us as it is to him. He takes his sweet time explaining all the legalities of the situation.

      Another solution would have to tell Cinque’s story in chronological order, beginning with him being a happy family man in his village in Sierra Leone, and the first scene is him getting kidnapped by rival tribesmen. We could then follow him on his journey to New Haven and come to learn his unique status that way. But then Cinque would begin the movie as a victim instead of as a rebel, the “action” of the movie would crash-land on the shores of Connecticut and there would be nothing left but the courtroom drama. It’s hard to describe the harrowing episodes of the slave-ship as “the good parts,” but, let’s face it, that is, for what it’s worth, what one comes to see when one comes to see a movie about capital-S Slavery, just as one would feel gypped if Spielberg had left Auschwitz out of Schindler’s List.

  4. Amazing Stories?

    Now that the first season of that series is on DVD, are you to review the episodes of the program he directed?