Amistad

Film as a history lesson, film as a good deed, film as an apology (in the narrower sense of Spielberg’s apology to African-Americans offended by certain scenes in The Color Purple and in the broader sense of the white man’s apology to oppressed blacks). In any case, Amistad is a film that seeks mainly to convey historical events smoothly rather than to present the facts with the maximum fidelity to actual historical events or with an attempt to unsettle viewers (and thus compel them to think more seriously). The very animalistic and, unusually for Spielberg, bloody prologue is the only slightly unpleasant sequence in the film, which is otherwise too easy to watch given its subject matter. The following minutes are filled with explaining and “humanising” the suggestive, intentionally incomprehensible opening minutes. The foreign is slowly pushed to the level of the familiar, while language and cultural barriers are removed. The right of slaves to commit a similar act is not the only issue addressed (due to the one-sidedly outraged perspective, all arguments are made in their favour). At the same time, parallels are sought between the slaves’ culture and Christianity, which Africans must understand in order to be at least partially accepted by a different society, as if this was the first (and thus necessary) step toward the later integration and emancipation of the black population. As much as Spielberg tries to respect the point of view of the Africans and to “de-objectify” them by at least (superficially) taking their cultural history into account, much more space is given to people who speak English fluently, whose goal seems to be to civilise the savages and rid them of their fear of the unknown. Perhaps even by misusing (an alternative interpretation of) the story of all stories, i.e. the story of the Bible. The question of who is entitled to write the story of humanity is one of the many that this ambitiously expansive film poses. The problem with Amistad is that it would like to suggestively depict the story of a group of slaves, to reveal slavery for viewers untouched by history (just as Schindler’s List revealed the Holocaust for them), to defend the importance of Christianity and democracy (i.e. the two ideologies that made slavery possible) and to humanistically point out the equality of all human beings. The film’s ideological goals are rather more mutually exclusive than intertwined and complementary, which doesn’t change the fact that the film works superbly on a basic, emotional level thanks to Spielberg’s storytelling skill and feel for visual shorthand. Though we could have additional criticisms about the film’s extreme literalness, the many famous actors who draw attention away from the plot or the inappropriate comedic interludes on the theme of the clash of two different cultures, which would have been more suitable for a buddy movie, none of this diminishes the emotional power of some of the film’s excellent scenes, such as Hopkins’s Oscar-winning speech before the Supreme Court. 75% (13/03/2016) (menos) (mais)