Word: spielbergisms
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...extraordinarily important film, perhaps the most important film of my career." --Steven Spielberg on Amistad...
...grants some men the right to utterly dehumanize other men. It completely justifies the bloody murders that ensue when this figure, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), frees himself and leads the human cargo of the slave ship La Amistad in revolt. And slammed at us at the start of Amistad, Steven Spielberg's movie about that incident, it signals the director's intention to ignore the principle--lofty sentiments excusing clunky filmmaking--upon which most morally instructive movie epics are built...
...other words, words--lots of words. But Spielberg is up to their challenge. His handling of the long courtroom scenes is wonderfully alert to unsuspected visual and dramatic possibilities. Better still, he and the screenplay (credited to David Franzoni) are alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. In our own age, with democracy travestied by ethnic- and interest-group politicking, the most instructive thing about Amistad may lie in its demonstration that broad principle, shrewdly advanced, can find ways...
Legal maneuver and political maneuver, the dank gloom of the prison into which the Africans are crammed, awaiting their fate, an astonishing evocation of the terrors of the slave ships' notorious Middle Passage--Spielberg permits himself time to explore every aspect of his saga in rich detail. And he grants his actors--among them a warily compassionate Morgan Freeman as a black abolitionist; Matthew McConaughey as a puppyish lawyer growing into an attack dog; Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, bent with age and crotchets, but finally lending his eloquence to the cause--a similar latitude. It's a shame...
...STEVEN SPIELBERG Affirmative action tie-in & White House sleepover for Amistad...