![]() Cinque and his companions came ashore in the Northeast, where they were captured and taken to Hartford, Conn., to stand trial. Instead, the Spaniards navigated the Amistad toward the United States. ![]() After taking over the ship, Cinque ordered the Spaniards to sail in what he believed was the direction of Africa. The head mutineer, Cinque, was from Sierra Leone, a British colony where slavery was outlawed. The mutineers were West Africans being taken to Havana to be sold by the two Spaniards who had bought them. The story of the Amistad mutiny, which took place in 1839, is a complicated one. Melodramatic where "Schindler's List" was tragic, programmatically uplifting and manipulative where the first film was restrained, "Amistad" is prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration - sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft. The movie is Spielberg's attempt to do for slavery what he did for the Holocaust in "Schindler's List" (I don't mean that cynically), and it makes every mistake that his earlier movie avoided. Seeing "Amistad" is a little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them. It might be an illustration from one of those gift volumes of American history we got as children and left unread. You look at this bunch of oddly dressed orators and think, "We came from them?" There are exceptions, like "The Birth of a Nation," or more recently, "Glory." More typical is the shot in Steven Spielberg's new "Amistad" of the Supreme Court, where every mane of white hair seems to be bathed in a nimbus of light and the marble busts of the forefathers ringing the chamber all seem to have recently been polished. Gore Vidal had it all wrong when he wrote in a recent New Yorker, "Our writers and directors tend to know as little about the country's history as the audience, so when they set a story in the past the characters are just like us except they're in costume." It's almost always the opposite. Outfitted in wigs and breeches, the cast strikes poses and declaims words whose immortality they seem assured of before they open their mouths. Actors and directors engaged in filming historical subjects often work less for the moment than for the ages. That, I think, is part of the reason American history (particularly pre-Civil War), so fiery on the page, is usually so dull and static on-screen. I'm not saying that no one can honestly enjoy American history (simply as a story, how can you not?), just that our appreciation is so often showy and false, furrow-browed and solemn, when our natural comportment is casual, slangy, disrespectful. All it takes is the mere mention of magic phrases like "Founding Fathers" or "Our Great Heritage" to turn us into "cultured" people who profess to enjoy what they think is "enriching" rather than what they actually like. A MERICANS NEVER SEEM phonier than when we're being reverent about our past.
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