The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

That evil comes in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy), a thick-muscled, gas-masked terrorist who stands in stark contrast to the wiry Scarecrow and Joker of previous films. Bane is as capable of plotting absurdly complex, large-scale destruction as his evil predecessors, but he also has the bulk to go one on one with Batman's own bruising style of combat. His careful calculation does not innately terrify as does the Joker's erratic unpredictability, but Hardy ably works double time as a mastermind and, essentially, his own henchman. Furthermore, Bane's rationality, however severe and intolerant of failure, does prove alluring to the hordes of impoverished average citizens swept under ledgers in this supposed golden age for Gotham, and where Batman once had to contend with nothing more than a handful of devotees, now he must face down an entire army of riled lumpenproletariat.

Nolan's blockbusters are all defined by an inability to trim, and The Dark Knight Rises suffers from more bloat than any of his other, overstuffed features. Before the Bane/Batman conflict even surfaces, Wayne must crawl his way back to fighting form, as well as deal with his ailing company, suffering losses from a mothballed clean energy project. The latter involves the investment of one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who also doubles as a possible love interest for Wayne. And then there is Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar who specializes in ripping off the rich. Nolan dangles Kyle out not only as a potential love interest but a potential villain to boot. Oh, and then, there is a Gotham police officer, Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an orphan who knows that Bruce Wayne is really Batman because of some kind of orphan Shining and wants Batman to come back after Gordon gets shot. Oh I forgot, Gordon gets shot early in the movie. These plot points stretch the narrative as it is, and Nolan eventually expands each of these strands until the film bursts at the seams. Nolan delights in playing chessmaster and trickster with his narratives, but he has so many pieces to move here that, despite the film's hefty runtime, large details fall through the cracks and time in general passes in the blink of an eye, a key flaw for a film that works best when emphasizing both the arduously slow journey of redemption and the breathlessly tight timeframe in which that journey must be undertaken.

Explanations and clarifications of all these plotlines come through atrocious sound mixing, which buries dialogue and only occasionally gives any force to the more grandiose sound effects and score. The muffled dialogue would matter less were Nolan willing to let the images speak for themselves, but expository dialogue rears its head at every turn. When Cotillard's Tate reminds Wayne of their stalled project, she starts offering so many details she threatens to launch into a history lesson of fusion itself at any second. Characters offer up life stories with the slightest provocation, halting an already unwieldy behemoth. In the film's most unintentionally hilarious scene, one character launches into an overexpository description of a nefarious plan (one filled with already known details and sufficiently visualized with intercut shots of the action being related through speech) as the clock literally runs out of a major threat. But with fewer than three minutes to deal with a huge danger, Batman, Kyle and Gordon all stop and listen to this other character monologue.

Yet if The Dark Knight Rises indulges the very worst of Nolan's tendencies as a filmmaker, it also expands upon his most appealing traits until even the flaws are subsumed into some kind of declarative auteur statement, even if Nolan's style is altogether too banal for such a thing to even be possible. Nolan's blockbusters all mistake scale for composition, but here he gets so grandiose he almost bridges the two. The opening sequence, of a mid-air kidnapping continues to stress the director's fetish for realism in ridiculously outsized stunts, yet for once Nolan embraces the sheer lunacy of what he shoots, setting the mood for his most successful fusion of huge spectacle and vague plausibility yet. Greatly aiding matters is a level of action coherence heretofore unseen in Nolan's work. At last, his close-combat filming achieves a genuine visceral effect because the director holds back just enough to let the audience follow along. Nowhere is this better seen than in the first brawl between Batman and Bane, which highlights Bane's strength and speed against the lumbering Bat and adds a level of savagery to each sick thud the villain lands on a formidable icon who suddenly looks so very weak.

Elsewhere, Nolan brings back some of the loopier visual stylings of Batman Begins, especially in a tossed-off mini-sequence of Batman and Catwoman prowling the sewers looking for Bane, Catwoman distracting patrolling thugs as Batman pulls some Bat-tastic moves like upside-down grabs and a zig-zagging run in the dark illuminated only by the flash of gunfire. Late in the film, Wayne spends some time in a literal pit of a prison, its Escherian properties clearly dear to the director's heart. Nolan also has a ball when Bane's plan comes to fruition, plunging Gotham into a social uprising that bypasses Occupy for the French Revolution and makes for some of the best images of the entire trilogy. Indeed, nothing else in the film is so evocative, striking, and wonderfully insane as Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) sitting atop a massive dais passing kangaroo court judgments on Gotham's wealthy. For a series that has only gotten more literal-minded as it has worn on, such brief breaths of ingenuity hint that somewhere in that fussy brain of his, Nolan actually has an imagination.

These rare moments of respite become all the more treasured as the plot wears on and spirals out of control. Yet the ramshackle sequencing of the lugubrious plot is, to this writer anyway, inexplicably charming. Writing in total CYA mode, the Nolan brothers attempt to satisfactorily map out not only the various character and narrative arcs of the film but the muddled politics of this saga. The Dark Knight Rises offers evidence to support any reading. Batman, the billionaire hero, intervenes in a populist revolt and sides openly with the police in a street war. However, Bane's manipulation of Gotham's underclass stands in sharp, vile contrast to whatever disillusionment the people might feel. The most admirable, if wildly inconsistent, quality of Nolan's Batman films has been that of consequence, a rare trait of most comic book movies, with their weightless CGI and flippant bombast. Nolan does not come down on any one side of his many contradictory messages but demonstrates how actions ripple out and mingle until blame and righteousness matter less than simply solving a problem that has gotten out of hand. True, Nolan makes this point less through thoughtful examination than simply throwing everything he can at the screen, but he nevertheless ends up breaking down the simplistic good vs. evil conflict of so many superhero movies, including Nolan's last two.

Nolan's best diversions, however, involve the space he gives to his actors. Bale's entropic performance as Wayne/Batman has always been the least dynamic element of these films, but his withered, defeated entrance in this film (and in the aftermath of a fight with Bane) clarifies that iciness as the mark of a man who has been broken since childhood. His literal shattering in this film is not a horrifying twist; it is the inevitable, physical bookend to the emotional devastation from which a little boy never recovered. Oldman, Freeman and Caine make it look almost too easy, especially Caine, who milks a part specifically written to wring tears from the audience for all it's worth. But once again, it's the antagonists who command attention. Hardy adopts a high, almost cheery voice that conflicts with his thick frame and obscured face. Before he sets in motion his attack on Gotham, he jovially praises a boy's on-the-nose singing of the National Anthem to himself ("What a lovely, lovely voice!") And though his eyes generally look well beyond everyone into a thousand-yard stare of simmering fury and cold thought, Bane reacts to the first sighting of the Batwing with a look of curiosity, nonverbally asking, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

If the movie belongs to anyone, though, it's Hathaway, who steals the screen along with Martha Wayne's old pearls with a half-turn and backflip out of Wayne Manor and never gives it back. Hathaway plays up Selina's weaponized sensuality and captures the character's irritation with her own morality, so used to self-preservation that she cannot ever do the right thing without a hint of exasperation. Plus, in the morass of the film's politicking pile-on, only Hathaway manages to fully exhibit a clear social perspective as well as a change of heart communicated in a few glances of disgust and contemplation. Hathaway already proved her talent for portraying ambiguous, unpredictable characters in 2008's Rachel Getting Married, but it is no less thrilling to see her show it in a genre (and for a director) that typically has no clue what to do with women.

Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises does not address some of the fundamental flaws of this trilogy. For a director who loves intricate mastermind schemes, Nolan does not particularly stress Batman's intelligence and ability to outsmart his foes, choosing rather to highlight Batman's ability to have 280 pounds of muscle and punch people in the solar plexus. And how sad it is that the one example of long-term planning on Wayne's part—the sonar grid of The Dark Knight—is far and away the low point of the entire saga, a sloppily executed and morally dubious setpiece.  Nolan also lets his plots get away from him, and it is not to his credit that The Dark Knight feels like two films crammed into one and The Dark Knight Rises could be its own trilogy. Finally, this closing chapter builds off Inception to suggest that for all Nolan's supposed ambition as a mainstream filmmaker of ideas, his greatest desire is to helm a Bond picture. The Prestige, with its modest scale, perfectly interlocking mechanics and almost accidental profundity, remains his greatest film, indeed one of the greatest of the last decade. Yet The Dark Knight Rises is certainly the "most" Nolan film, a work that blends his talents and faults until distinguishing between the two becomes a pointless exercise. This near-three-hour film splits attention among a handful of major characters, all but two of whom, Wayne and Gordon, are brand new. It ties up every loose end it can even as it leaves major logic gaps unaddressed. It devotes a huge chunk of time to a political subtext that suggests any insight at all only through a barrage of surface-depth ideas. And frankly, this damn thing makes no sense on thematic or narrative grounds. And yet, on this thin foundation Nolan builds a behemoth, and what charm the film has lies in its ability to teeter incessantly without collapsing.

Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

If Wolfe's roman à clef was meant to be a detailed account of '80s New York in all its schismatic glory, highlighting the split between the budding Wall Street aristocracy and the terror of crack-ridden streets below the high-rise apartments, De Palma's film paints broad strokes of weak satire. No, that's not right; the film only softens one side of the dichotomy between wealthy, oblivious whites and impoverished minorities. Which side gets it easier in the eyes of majority-baiting Hollywood? Oh, take a wild guess.

Tom Hanks, not yet moved beyond his lighthearted comic image, plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street investor who makes millions by the minute and enjoys living the life of luxury. Hanks, only a few years out from his dramatic breakthroughs in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, occasionally flashes an edge that he could have brought to the fore had the screenplay wanted him to truly delve into the seedier aspects of a Wall Street player. Instead, the film uses Hanks' comic charm, portraying him as out-of-touch but not particularly loathsome in any capacity, despite his general celebration of his garish lifestyle and infidelity with a Southern gold digger named Maria (Melanie Griffith). Even when the two accidentally drive into a crime-ridden area of South Bronx and run over one of two black men who accost them, the film does its best to absolve Sherman while placing any blame for the racist and classist attitudes brought up in the hit-and-run squarely on the shoulders of Maria, caricatured out of human recognition into a whining harpy.

This simplified satire might have worked had the same humanizing effect been given to the other half of the film's overview of New York. Instead, poor Sherman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, runs into the undiluted fury of the poor and minority bloc of the city, their grandiose anger exposing hypocrisies and self-defeating extremism while the privileged enjoy a charmed interpretation of white-collar oblivion. The caricature of Al Sharpton, Reverend Bacon, borders on the racist, with De Palma's low-angle shots of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils nearly framing actor John Hancock in minstrel poses.

Bacon rails against the notion of the unidentified driver of a Mercedes getting away with the cops' indifference, rightly noting that they wouldn't just drop the case if some black driver had run over a middle-class white family. But like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, Bacon is as much a self-promoter as he is a civic crusader, and he clearly plays up for the cameras to make himself the focal point of the manipulated outrage. But he's successful, and soon he's got Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), the D.A. looking to for a way to win the minority vote after prosecuting minorities overwhelmingly, quaking in his suit. Abraham removed his name from the billing over a contract dispute, but part of me wonders if he did so after reflecting on his performance. If Hancock must make out the leaders of the black community to be nothing more than charlatans looking to crucify a white devil to maintain their stats, Abraham plays Weiss as a flagrant Jewish stereotype, greedily hunting power and also looking for a way to get one up over on the WASPs. When Bacon accuses him of letting the wealthy white go unpunished, Weiss frets over being seen as a "hymie racist pig," then muses aloud how the Italians, Irish and WASPs will love to see him squirm.

Obviously, this is satire, but it's paper-thin, and De Palma inserts nothing to offset the racist view of the city's minorities being wholly self-serving. Instead of flecking human beings with ironies and contradictions, he presents two-dimensional caricatures with comedy that isn't funny enough to absolve the troubling simplicity of their ethnic identities. Pointing out the class blindness that affects the underclass is a perfectly valid criticism, but here the blacks and Latinos come off as nothing more than a mob looking for a white scapegoat. And even when De Palma finally gets down to going after the elites—presenting them as entertained by Sherman's connection to such a pedestrian crime like Roman nobles approvingly watching enslaved gladiators torn to ribbons—he still lets Sherman almost completely off the hook. At the ridiculous trial that closes the film (presided over a black judge instead of the book's Jewish one so as to make Sherman's acquittal seem victorious rather than proof of the system stacked against non-whites), poor, frail Sherman is framed against a screaming, hissing, even singing (hymns, natch) crowd of the poor and pigmentally varied. Whether the De Palma meant it or not, and the swelling, unironic strings that accompany the verdict suggest at least someone did, the audience is meant to root for McCoy to get off Scot-free.

This is all bad enough, but various other additions weigh down the film in subtler ways. The film nearly approaches cleverness when Sherman attends a performance of Don Giovanni and clearly sees himself in the character, a point De Palma then drives him with a sledgehammer, ruining the one good part of the film. Bruce Willis, foisted upon De Palma and a noted pain on-set, plays the alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow, who desperately launches the hit-and-run case to give himself a popular story to justify the paychecks he drinks every day. Whatever role Fallow played in Wolfe's novel, he has no reason to exist here, and De Palma must resort to a framing device that awkwardly inserts him into the movie so Willis can deliver stiff voiceovers in that noncommittal drone of his.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is so clumsy that even the moments of pure De Palma fail to add some life into the film. A swirling overhead shot of Sherman and a coworker is an ingenious touch that makes great use of the striking floor design, but it only goes to show how little time the director spends in Sherman's corporate world. A split-screen between Bacon's self-aggrandizing harangues and a changing right image first showing an amused Fallow looking on then a nervous Weiss watching on TV feels like someone trying to ape De Palma with no regard for composition or juxtaposition. Even the elaborate, wildly entertaining tracking shot that opens the film, following Fallow as he arrives for a speaking engagement through the underground of a complex past admirers and pack reporters, fails to maintain its power when placed in context with the rest of the movie. When the film soon moves completely away from Fallow for an hour, the shot, maybe even Fallow's entire presence in the film, seems a self-serving addition.

After filming completed and The Bonfire of the Vanities went out to a critical and commercial savaging, De Palma finally admitted his error, even letting Julie Salamon come in and write a tell-all on the film's troubled production. I want to read that book as much as Wolfe's source novel: even a basic summary suggests studio tampering, uncooperative stars and wasteful expenditures. But hell, all of that is visible on the screen. It is stunning that a filmmaker as radical (aesthetically and politically) could make a film so firmly reactionary in its ultimate absolution of the luxury class—compare the subverted race roles of the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! to the clearly demarcated racial cartoons drawn here. Almost as unforgivable, it's one of the director's dullest films. Even the "punchline"-lacking Untouchables (to take a page from Pauline Kael) felt more alive than this.

The only good thing I can say about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it sports simply one of the greatest shots to ever appear in a De Palma film, a perfectly, almost freakishly timed shot of a Concorde jet landing at sunset as the landing strip aligns perfectly with the descending orb. It is a stunning, arduously planned moment, and it's the best indication of how much better the film might have been had De Palma and his crew been given a better cast and screenplay. From what I can tell, a more accurate representation of Wolfe's novel might have been right up De Palma's alley; he would have delighted in tearing everything apart. Instead, he made by far his most reactionary film, a lighthearted spoof of the upper class and a vicious portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised. Had De Palma not made his mea culpa later, I might have thought he did this on purpose; his other big Hollywood spectacle, The Untouchables, is also conservative. But even the wide berth I give to De Palma's irony has its limits, and if The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be as bad as it is, well, mission accomplished.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

In its own way, the opening segment of Amistad is every bit as brilliant, dynamic and self-contained as the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Keeping cinematographer Kimenski on board, Spielberg frame the uprising on the titular ship in shocking terms. It starts with extreme close-ups of the face of Cinqué (Djimon Honsou), a slave bound for Cuba, breathing laboriously and clearly struggling. Cut to another extreme close-up of his fingers scraping at the wood of his bench in an attempt to free the nail, the jaw-clenching squeaks across wood deafening in the silence of the rocking ship at night. Lightning flashes (divorced from any masking thunder) illuminate chipped fingernails and bleeding tips. The suspense is as unbearable as any shot of Jews hiding from Nazis.

At last, Cinqué frees himself and releases the other captives, who storm the ship and slaughter the Spanish crew. The same lightning that showed us the slave freeing himself also reveal yet cover up the bloodbath. Spielberg shows glimpses of the violence, flashes of beastly faces in fearsome war yells. The fury is terrible to behold, and Cinqué only just manages to stop himself from killing the final two crew members, aware that he needs them to steer him home. The whole sequence is one of Spielberg's finest moments, playing on his love of Judeo-Christian imagery (of slaves coming out of bondage via the removal of a nail in wood that has direct Christian connotations) and his ability to make something visceral out of moral drama. Were it not such a pure demonstration of humanity's primal urge to survive and assert free will, one might call the animalistic visions of rampaging blacks at least subconsciously racist. Compared to the borderline stereotypical posturing of the actors in The Color Purple, these depictions are prouder and more defiant.

Such depictions are also clarified through the film's later structure, which does not move in easy chronological order but contextualizes what we see in retrospect so we never glory in what's happening. Even when it seems all is won and even the characters cheer in victory, Spielberg is waiting to pull back and reveal the full scope of the issue at hand. It's a clear response to those who felt he focused on the "success story" of the Schindler Jews at the expense of the six million less-fortunate souls.

The rest of the film relies on considerably less showy direction than the opening -- it is a courtroom drama, after all -- but Spielberg manages to maintain his usual penchant for visual storytelling with more static shots. The first 20 minutes or so contain nary a word of English and few subtitles, placing the heft of narrative building solely on Spielberg's camera. With nothing more than the right distance and angle, Spielberg manages to eke out not only what's happening but an emotional current for it. Cinqué spares the two officers and orders the one who understands Mende to turn around and head back to Africa. We see Cinqué's pride and leadership skills as he interacts with other Mende, but we also get a glimpse of how out of his element he is: when he briefly plays with the ship's helm he seems almost childlike. Slowly, the director drops hints of trouble: food runs scarce and the slave ship keeps sailing past vessels with white people on them. At last, when they run aground and some of the rebel slaves go to fetch water, it becomes clear they couldn't be stopping on land at all if they were really on their way back over the Atlantic.

Sure enough, the slaves are captured by an American frigate and placed in jail in Connecticut. When they arrive, the white prisoners protest having to share so much as the same room with the slaves, who are soon brought to court for what promises to be an open-and-shut case. When complications arise, they are not over the issue of whether what the slaves did was justifiable; it is merely a question of whether the Africans are pirates or property. A sub-question: whose property are they? Spielberg has displayed a certain rose-colored view of America from time to time, and his moderate Hollywood liberalism has allowed him to play both sides of the fence with impunity for decades. But here he at last fully confronts that which he only gave a glancing blow 12 years earlier: the nation's history of slavery and racism.

I felt that The Color Purple's chief shortcoming was in its over-reliance of cheap humor that never meshed with the moments of sincerity and pain. Yet I never felt the heaping load of comedy injected into Amistad detracted from the film. Here, Spielberg and writer David Franzoni base the humor in situational comedy instead of the farce of The Color Purple. Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), the ambulance(-cart)-chasing lawyer who agrees to defend the Africans for a pair of abolitionist journalists (Morgan Freeman and Stellan Skarsgård), tries to communicate with the slaves, but the language barrier leads to minutes worth of mishaps and confusion. Even when a basic form of primitive gestures sort out a handful of problems between him and Cinqué, the two still make for a fine double act. Once a translator (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Royal Navy officer who joined the fleet after being freed by Britain's anti-slavery forces, enters and tells Cinqué's story, however, the laughs die in the throat.

In fairness, Amistad does have one too many Stanley Kramer-esque lapses of moralizing for its own good. The obvious arc of Baldwin from a brilliant-but-detached lawyer into a crusader for human rights is all too predictable, and the simplification of white characters into good and true liberals and frothing bigots who for some reason gather by the hundreds to jeer blacks for killing people from another country is tedious. Martin Van Buren gets thrown under the bus as a racist and conniver, leaving out the much more complex (and relevant) moral confusion of those politicians who did not support slavery but felt it necessary to keep the peace and avoid war. Amistad glosses over this hairy situation by making Van Buren as loathsome as possible and never giving the threat of war the gravity it deserves, especially in hindsight of the horrific costs of the Civil War.

But there are also flecks of some of Spielberg's most intelligent and thoughtful filmmaking. If he simplifies the bigoted antagonists, he at least explores the gray within the abolitionist cause: Tappan (Skarsgård), who came to anti-slavery through religion, sees value in martyrdom and would be willing to sacrifice the lives of the Africans if it meant stunning the public into action. He balks at Baldwin's strategy -- to render the matter of property null and void by proving the slaves came from Africa and therefore could not be taken as slaves following the criminalization of importing foreign slaves -- because it lacks a moral statement. He compares Baldwin's idea to Christ calling someone to get him off on a technicality, to which Baldwin replies, "But Christ lost."


Spielberg frames the racism in horrendously blunt terms, to the point that a few words of dismissal in the courtroom shock and disgust almost as much as flashbacks of murders, torture and rapes at the hands of Portuguese and Spanish sailors. Through the translator, Cinqué tells his story and of the atrocities he witnessed to Baldwin, and when the camera returns from his reverie he's in the courtroom relating this to the prosecution, U.S. Attorney William S. Holabird (Pete Postlethwaite), who instantly calls Cinqué's story a fabrication. He never once views Cinqué and the others as anything but wayward property, even when the African leader moves everyone else with his pidgin chant "Give us us free!" But really, no one in the court truly takes Cinqué's story seriously until a representative of the Royal Navy's anti-slavery troops, a white man, corroborates the slave's story. The film stresses this irony, laying percussive African music and mournful Western vocalization over Cinqué's flashbacks but reserving the somber, stunned chords for the mere words the naval officer says. And isn't it funny that those white people so disgusted by the very idea of blacks wear nothing but ink-black cloaks and clothes?

Amistad represents an autocritique of the traits Spielberg displayed in Schindler's List, even if, as I've argued, the seemingly problematic issues of that movie smooth out remarkably well on closer study. Schindler's List moved methodically through its horrors, to the point that one would be tempted to cheer if it ended Inlgourious Basterds style with Schinder's Jews machine-gunning Hitler and his companions. Here, he opens with an act of horror that later proves to be scarcely inadequate a show of rage. Yes, the audience will likely end up supporting the slaughter of Spaniards, but by putting so much distance between the outcome and the motivation, Spielberg takes all the "enjoyment" (for want of a better word) out of it and makes it something you think about it retrospect. And when it reaches what seems to be its triumphant climax, Spielberg reveals we've got another hour to go, enough time to let it sink in that, even if these slaves emerge triumphant and go home free men, that will barely put a dent on the slave trade (the illegality of which is ignored by everyone until a court is forced to deal with the issue), and their victory won't bring back the scores who died on their very ship from starvation and murder.

But the most surprising aspect of the film is Spielberg's harsh take on American politics and the notion of the American/Western ideal. John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), former president and defeated old man, putters about the film for the first two thirds until Baldwin prevails upon him successfully to help the Africans when Van Buren kicks the case to the Supreme Court despite the issue seemingly being resolved. Adams worries about standing in the shadow of his father, a worry confirmed by the dismissive views of other politicians. Yet it eventually becomes clear to the man that the only way to build his own legacy separate from that of his father is to help the document John Adams helped write achieve its full potential instead of being held back by the same sort of reactionary fools who hobbled it in the first place.

Hopkins wisely chooses to play Quincy less as a crotchety old man embittered by his perceived failure than as a resigned idealist. His climactic speech is powerful, all the more so for incorporating Cinqué's own words as a sign of respect and equality, but Hopkins adds labored breaths and grunts under even the most solemn proclamation to ground the moment. When he finishes, no one applauds. They're too busy truly thinking about what was just said.

Its length may be unjustified, it oversimplifies history and some moments fall flat -- the parallels of Cinqué summoning the spirits of his ancestors and Quincy dealing with his own progenitor have too much of a "we're not so different after all!" feel, and the brief clip of Civil War action in the closing montage is embarrassing -- but Amistad deserves more credit than I was willing to give it going into the film. It gets one last parting shot in the final text scroll, noting that Cinqué returned to find his wife and child gone, themselves likely sold in slavery, a reminder that the significant victory he and the others enjoyed only made a small blip on the radar. But it was right, and that is the point Amistad makes even as it acknowledges the darkness of the full scope.