[In the following review, Kauffmann lauds Amistad as a “solid” and “engrossing” film.]

Uniquely, attractively, Steven Spielberg's career is scored with deep changes of intent. Mostly he has worked in the realm of popular pictures, sweeping the world with success after success by realizing juvenile fantasies with a mature talent. But sometimes he employs that talent on mature subjects. The Color Purple, to some degree, grasped troubling matters in black American society. Schindler's List, to the gratifying surprise of many of us, dramatized monumentally the mystery of good in the midst of the mystery of evil. Now Spielberg presents a film out of nineteenth-century American history that again demonstrates his extraordinary gifts.

Amistad (Dream Works) tells a story so significant that its relative obscurity up to now is hard to understand. (After famine, a feast: an opera called Amistad has just appeared in Chicago.) To compress it: in 1839, on board the Spanish ship Amistad, bound from Havana to a slave port with a cargo of black Africans, the recently captured slaves revolted, led by a man called Cinqué, killed most of the Spanish crew, and ordered the two survivors to return them to Africa. Before very long the Amistad was commandeered by an American naval vessel and taken to Connecticut. After a hearing, the slaves were put on trial. The U.S. government's argument was that the slaves were property and should be returned to their owners. The defense, quick and hot, was that they ought to be returned to Africa.

The case tangled with a Spanish-American treaty and with sharp domestic controversy. It drew immense attention in this country, along with visitors to the New Haven prison to see the blacks, as a burning issue for both pro- and antislavery forces; and President Van Buren tried to walk a tightrope to avoid offending either group in his upcoming election campaign. The Federal District Court held that the slaves should be returned to Africa, a ruling upheld by the Circuit Court. The government then appealed to the Supreme Court to reverse the decision, and the defense was joined by John Quincy Adams, aged 74, the former president, and now a member of Congress. The defense won. The blacks were returned to Africa (where, in fact, ironies awaited).

To deal with this complex story, Spielberg had of course to condense it. With a screenplay credited to David Franzoni, which adds at least one fictional character and alters some real ones, the result is inevitably incomplete and in some regards hyperbolic. But the film conveys the mass and weight of this national, international, yet scorchingly personal drama.

Without in the least slighting Spielberg's concerns with the materials as such, for me a chief benefit of the screenplay is that it offers splendid opportunities for his filmmaking gifts. Clearly he was building his film on texture. Aided by his superb cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, who did Schindler's List, and by his designer, Ruth Carter, who provided almost palpable clothes, Spielberg puts people before us, not costumed actors, and he puts us among those people.

The very first shot, an intense close-up of a black man, dirt-caked and wet, as lightning flashes, as he struggles to pull his shackles loose in the ship's hold, not only crystallizes the theme; it seizes us with verity, the sense that a vital filmmaking talent is striking toward the truth. Scene after scene confirms this feeling—small deployments of groups that vary the patterns we didn't know we hoped not to see, large swells of pleasure like the first shot of a courtroom in afternoon light, which persuades us that the world was real and people had eyes back then, too. I can't remember a stronger sense of my presence in the past since Bergman's The Virgin Spring.

As agon, as embodiment of the struggles involved in the slave trade, in its meanings for American and European civilization, the film depends greatly on the performance of Cinqué, and here Spielberg's choice can only be called brilliant. Djimon Hounsou is a native of Benin who has been living in Paris and has had small roles in French and American films. He is a magnificent-looking man, but it is his spirit, more than his physique, that fulfills the role. Courage, anger, the dignity of a slave who despises his masters—all these come from Hounsou as emanations, not “creations.” If you think the film exaggerates Cinqué's bearing and being, read William Cullen Bryant's contemporary poem about him, which begins “Chained in a foreign land he stood, / A man of giant frame.” Hounsou becomes the Atlas on whom the cosmos of this drama rests.

The only other character of comparable importance is, naturally, John Quincy Adams. The writing of this role has been touched, invitingly though visibly, by theater. Some of Adams's qualities have been shaped into what might be called a George Arliss part. In the 1930s Arliss used to play crotchety older men, including historical figures (Disraeli, Wellington, Richelieu) who were seemingly out of things but who were discreetly observant and who stepped forward at the end to settle all difficulties. Anthony Hopkins plays this role here, cleverly clothed in Adams-ness, and from his first moments we get the savor of a fine actor relishing a damned good part. Our first glimpse is of Adams dozing in the House yet making a keen reply when it's needed. We see him at home fussing with the plants in his hothouse. After the defense wins the New Haven trial, we know the government must appeal because Adams has so far appeared only peripherally. The structure of the film, as well as the facts of history, require that the case go to the Supreme Court so that Adams can flourish. He does. He argues. He wins. Hopkins, as Adams and as himself, is magisterial.

Morgan Freeman shines—he's an actor capable of reticent shining—as an ex-slave who now is head of an anti-slavery group in the North. Nigel Hawthorne (of The Madness of King George) is smilingly obsequious as Van Buren. Pete Postlethwaite (of In the Name of the Father) bites like a bulldog as the principal prosecutor. Matthew McConaughey does what he can with the sketchiest main character; the first defense lawyer.

The only women visible in the film are some of the missionaries who come to the prison to save the black men's souls. A questionable sequence results from the gift of an illustrated Bible to one of the black men, who figures out, from the picture, the relevance of the story of Jesus. The contradiction in a Christian society that owned slaves would have been lucid enough without this sequence. But Spielberg's weakest choice is the John Williams score, which sometimes floats wordless choruses under big moments. The moments might have been even bigger with less music.

Nonetheless, Amistad, shortcomings and all, is solid, engrossing. While it's in progress, it envelops us; paradoxically, when it's finished, it seems to stand free, like a strong sculpture. Spielberg, the master of film-world success, shows yet again that he is master of much more than that success. In both aspects, and because of both aspects, he is invaluable.