Spielberg’s Passage

While it’s tempting but unfair to see him as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Steven Spielberg does have a split in his filmmaking personality. The work of America’s most successful director has in recent years alternated between the extremes of noble, serious films like “Schindler’s List” and feeble no-brainers like “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” with no time left for anything in between.

Leaving aside the theoretical question of whether this drastic division, the wholesale avoidance of what might be called intelligent entertainment, is a welcome thing in such a capable filmmaker, the well-intentioned “Amistad”--the story of the momentous aftermath of a 1839 shipboard rebellion of 53 African slaves--shows the practical dangers of the split.

For though it’s an engrossing piece of work that once again displays the director’s impressive mastery of mainstream filmmaking, “Amistad” also shows that Spielberg’s system is not working. There’s been leakage from the no-brainers to the quality stuff and, in a cinematic version of Gresham’s law, bad habits picked up in the mindless movies are driving out better ones. This has kept “Amistad” from being the film it might have been, the film its director intended.

“Amistad” is, of course, laden with virtues. It takes on a difficult and important story and largely tells it well, especially in visual terms. Few directors have Spielberg’s fine pictorial sense, his understanding of the narrative power of cinematic storytelling. Many of “Amistad’s” most lasting moments, like the raggedy slaver silently passing an elegant party listening to shipboard chamber music, do without any kind of dialogue at all, and the feeling occurs more than once that the silent film era would have suited this director’s talents superbly.

The scene that opens “Amistad” shows how it’s done. Starting with a tight close-up of an eye alive in darkness, Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and editor Michael Kahn create a compelling montage of the rebellion on board La Amistad off the coast of Cuba that leaves the Africans and their leader, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), in charge of their destinies. Desperate to sail back to their homeland but tricked by the Spaniards they trusted to navigate the ship, the Africans ended up in American coastal waters. They’re captured and taken to New Haven for a trial to determine whether they are to be considered as property or free men.

Though it’s shown in flashback, “Amistad’s” strongest scene, a depiction of the tortures of the Middle Passage--the journey newly sold slaves made from Africa to the Caribbean--also plays without dialogue. Never have those horrors been treated so graphically in a major Hollywood film, and the influence on Spielberg’s style of the “Schindler’s List” experience (also shot by Kaminski) is unmistakable.

In the same way, the Africans, who don’t learn English until late in the picture, come off much better in the film than Americans of either color. Speaking subtitled Mende, the language of the region (now Sierra Leone) from which they were kidnapped into slavery, they are portrayed, even during their worst, most confused moments, as shrewder, more alive than most of the Americans they come in contact with.

This is especially true for the character of Cinque, the Africans’ reluctant leader. Though Benin native Hounsou, who modeled for Herb Ritts before starting an acting career, does not have extensive training or experience, his English dialogue is minimal and his strong presence while speaking Mende projects a remarkable dignity and bearing that is exactly what the part calls for.

There are, however, Americans in “Amistad,” and overall they come off as actors playing dress-up but not fooling anyone. This is where the habits of the “Jurassic Park” films, so pathetic in terms of character they should have been embarrassing but apparently weren’t, have rubbed off on Spielberg. Rusty with people and unaware of how flat his English dialogue is playing, he’s allowed many of his protagonists and situations to come across as unnecessarily broad and buffoonish. The Steven Spielberg who oversaw Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in “Jaws” has apparently left the building.

“Amistad’s” screenplay is credited to David Franzoni (HBO’s “Citizen Cohn”), but it is known that Steven Zaillian, an Oscar winner for “Schindler’s List,” did considerable rewriting (though unrealistic Writers Guild rules did not permit his name on the screen). While any speculation as to who did what is pure guesswork, there are moments, especially in the closing speeches of John Quincy Adams, that Zaillian’s welcome touch is felt.

As played by Anthony Hopkins, Adams, son of Founding Father John Adams, himself a former president and currently the grand old man of the Senate, is a treat to behold, easily the best of “Amistad’s” English speakers. Though his acting here is the kind of showy impersonation that exists largely on the surface, watching this masterful performer grumbling his way through the role of a cranky old galoot creates a surface that is satisfyingly rich and amusing.

Adams gets involved because abolitionists Theodore Joadson and Lewis Tappan (Morgan Freeman and Stellan Skarsgard, both underutilized) want to turn the trial of the imprisoned Africans into a media event that would publicize the horrors of slavery.

The former president initially turns down the offer to lead the defense because of his age: He’s 73 and hasn’t argued a case in court for three decades. But, sounding like a creative studio executive, he offers some sage advice: “Find out who they are, find out their story.”

If Hopkins is the strongest of the English-speaking actors, Matthew McConaughey is at the weak end. He plays Roger Baldwin, the hustling attorney who does take the case, treating it at first like a simple matter of property and gradually coming to embrace the Africans’ humanity. (The real Baldwin was a more impressive and committed attorney who ended up governor of Connecticut.) Presumably hired for his star power, McConaughey is unimpressive in his sparse, Horace Greeley-type beard, and it’s hard not to agree with the Africans when they compare him to the dung scrapers they knew back home.

Most of the film involves the process by which the captives, aided by a bilingual translator, find their voices and get their stories told, and how Adams, in part angered by the manipulations of President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), agrees to plead the Africans’ case when it goes before a slave-owning Supreme Court.

It’s a tribute to Spielberg’s ability and serious intentions that “Amistad” is laced with memorable moments, but while they are the best Hollywood has to offer, they are pure Hollywood nevertheless. What saved “Schindler’s List” from this self-conscious nobility was the ambiguity of Oskar Schindler’s personality and Spielberg’s willingness to treat incendiary material coolly. The lesson he seemed to have learned there, that the strongest stories call for the greatest restraint, is one he has at least partially forgotten here.

* MPAA rating: R, for some scenes of strong brutal violence and some related nudity. Times guidelines: murder of the captain of the Amistad and especially graphic scenes of the horrors of slavery.

‘Amistad’

Morgan Freeman: Joadson

Nigel Hawthorne: Martin Van Buren

Anthony Hopkins: John Quincy Adams

Djimon Hounsou: Cinque

Matthew McConaughey: Baldwin

A DreamWorks production, in association with HBO Pictures. Director Steven Spielberg. Producers Spielberg, Debbie Allen, Colin Wilson. Screenplay by David Franzoni. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. Editor Michael Kahn. Costumes Ruth E. Carter. Music John Williams. Production design Rick Carter. Art directors Chris Burian-Mohr, Jim Teegarden, Tony Fanning. Running time: 2 hours, 34 minutes.

*

* At selected Los Angeles theaters. Additional limited engagements begin Friday.