Steven Spielberg (91 page)

Echo of Lions
does contain many elements similar to the film, but
DreamWorks
lawyers argued that is inevitable when two works deal with the same historical subject. The film’s dramatic scenes, characters, and dialogue differ substantially from the novel, but in some significant ways the film seems to closely track Chase-Riboud’s fictional account, from the character of a black abolitionist printer (although DreamWorks pointed to a black abolitionist minister as a model, the top-billed Morgan Freeman plays a printer in the film) to the key detail of a captive pulling a nail from the deck of the
Amistad
to pick the locks on their chains, an incident in the film’s opening sequence. Furthermore, Chase-Riboud alleged that the film’s credited screenwriter,
David
Franzoni, had been involved with Dustin Hoffman’s company in
developing
a film version of
Echo of Lions
, and that Franzoni had admitted reading her book, although he denied having done so. (Spielberg offered Hoffman the role of ex-president John Quincy Adams, who defended the
Amistad
captives before the U.S. Supreme Court, but his schedule did not permit it; the part went to Anthony Hopkins.)

After a long and bitter trial-by-press, which involved countercharges by DreamWorks attorneys that Chase-Riboud had plagiarized material from
Owens’s
Black Mutiny
and a failed attempt by Chase-Riboud to obtain an
injunction
to block the film’s release, the novelist finally reached an agreement with DreamWorks in February 1998 (no financial settlement was reported). She issued a statement exonerating the company from blame: “After my lawyers had a chance to review DreamWorks’ files and other documents and evidence, my lawyers and I concluded that neither Steven Spielberg nor DreamWorks did anything improper, and I instructed my lawyers to conclude this matter in a timely and amicable fashion. I think
Amistad
is a splendid piece of work, and I applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the courage to make it.”

But by then the damage had been done to Spielberg’s reputation, since many writers seemed to assume his guilt. How the case would have fared if it had gone to trial is a matter of conjecture. When U.S. District Court Judge Audrey Collins turned down the request for an injunction, she stated, “At this early stage, the court cannot conclude that plaintiff [Chase-Riboud] has established a probability of success. Nevertheless, … the court determines that plaintiff has raised serious questions going to the merits of her copyright infringement claim.”

Whether this undecided dispute should invalidate the aesthetic worth of
Amistad
is a matter of individual judgment, though it might be noted that
Citizen Kane
was also the target of a copyright infringement suit. It ended in a hung jury, and RKO settled out of court; that long-forgotten episode has done nothing to damage the reputation of the film or its director, Orson Welles. But Chase-Riboud’s attacks on Spielberg’s integrity found receptive ears among many who are predisposed to discredit this popular filmmaker’s intermittent forays into historical subject matter; even
Schindler’s List
provoked some viciously personal attacks on the filmmaker, as his 2005 film
Munich
, dealing with Israeli retribution for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, would do as well.

Amistad
is generally accurate historically, dramatizing the court battles compellingly and capturing the brutality of the Middle Passage in sequences as devastating as the representations of the Holocaust in
Schindler’s List
. But
Amistad
takes some liberties for dramatic emphasis. The final screenplay was written by
Schindler’s List
screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who greatly improved the dialogue and enriched the dramatic texture. DreamWorks sought to credit him with Franzoni, but Zaillian was denied after a Writers Guild of America arbitration. Roger Baldwin, the lead lawyer for the captives, was in reality a distinguished middle-aged man and future governor of Connecticut, not the scruffy hustler played by Matthew McConaughey, whose character was changed to make him more of a surrogate figure for the contemporary audience as well as a closer identification figure for Spielberg himself. The film’s harsh portrait of white abolitionists seems one-sided, and it plays unacceptably loosely with history when it says that seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court were Southern slave owners. In fact, five members of the court in 1841 were Northerners, and one of those was the lone dissenter in the
Amistad
case. Adams’s eleven-minute argument to the court is an artfully condensed, paraphrased version of what he actually said in a speech lasting eight hours over two days.

Criticism of the film for focusing more on the white characters than on the captives is not accurate because Cinqué (magnificently played by African actor and model Djimon Hounsou) and the other Africans are allotted a great deal of screen time, are shown speaking their native Mende language, and are
always
at the center of the dramatic developments. An extended sequence shows Cinqué relaying astute legal suggestions to the exasperated Adams from his prison cell, and Cinqué’s meeting with Adams at the former president’s home in Massachusetts (an invention, since the two never met) is the film’s dramatic centerpiece. When Cinqué says that he will summon his ancestors to be with him at court, and that “they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all,” Spielberg’s slow tracking shot toward the silent, pensive Adams is deeply moving, since it shows him recognizing his true historical destiny as a great man’s failed son who is then given a second chance, through these African captives, to shape history. When Cinqué asks Adams what words he used to persuade the court, Adams replies, “Yours.” The Morgan Freeman character, Theodore Joadson, is deeply involved in the captives’ defense efforts. Although some reviewers complained that the role is
underwritten, they ignore Freeman’s great silent close-up showing quiet pride when Adams praises him for his heroic rise from slavery. Joadson’s hesitance in challenging Adams too bluntly is realistic in the context of the times, and yet he does so to a degree that both irritates the ex-president and helps shame him into action. It would have been historically false to show black characters controlling their destiny in that era any more directly, but Zaillian’s final screenplay respects the subtlety of their involvement and influence.

These Spielbergian “aliens” improve the lives of those they encounter, just like the aliens who bring transcendence to the lives of ordinary Americans in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Spielberg’s characteristic focus on the positive influence of outsiders, and their struggle for acceptance, is played out in many variations in
Amistad
, showing how they influence their lawyer to concentrate on their human rights rather than simply on the property issues of the case; inspire a judge to defy a corrupt presidential order; and bring out the best in a cantankerous ex-president whose sympathies for abolitionism, not fully expressed in the past, become his life’s mission. The film focuses constantly on issues of communication, another key Spielberg theme; in place of the musical tones in
Close Encounters
that enable the extraterrestrial visitors to communicate with earthlings, the visitors from another continent in
Amistad
manage to make a human connection once their insular American
sympathizers
finally take the trouble to learn their language. The breakthrough comes after they engage a Mende translator, Covey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former slave who winds up going back to Africa with the freedmen. The central
importance
of language in this “talking picture” is demonstrated in the
Spanish-language
title, meaning “friendship” as well as serving as a pun for “friend ship.” By sharing language, the lawyers and abolitionists are able to connect with the Africans as people with individual histories, heeding the urgent question posed by Adams: “What is their
story?
” Once their story begins to be told,
Amistad
becomes increasingly centered around the narrative dynamics created by Cinqué and his fellow captives.

After Cinqué gives Adams the insight about the importance of invoking his ancestors, the elderly man’s summation before the court, which Hopkins makes one of the most brilliant speeches in the history of the cinema, uses that theme as its centerpiece. Adams’s allusion to his father, former President John Adams, and his reconciliation with his legacy and that of the other Founding Fathers take on a dual meaning in the context of Spielberg’s body of work. This moment, emphasized with a camera movement toward Adams as he reaches the key line in his speech, goes beyond the immediate text to represent Spielberg’s reconciliation with his own father and the flawed father figures that populate so much of his work. Adams is surrounded by busts and paintings of his father and the other founders, whose stated ideals in the Declaration of Independence became compromised in practice. “We have long resisted asking you for guidance,” he says, addressing the founders. “Perhaps we have feared in doing so, we might acknowledge that our individuality, which we so, so revere, is not entirely our own. Perhaps we’ve feared an appeal
to you might be taken for weakness. But we have come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding, that who we are
is
who we were.”

The emphatic camera movement, the gravity of the performance, and the centrality of the idea to Spielberg’s body of work come together to make this the climactic moment of his career. The filmmaker’s obsessive, career-long theme of struggle with flawed father figures is, symbolically, put to rest in this moment of intergenerational acceptance. Adams is coming to terms with his own previous sense of inadequacy and his acceptance of the imperfect but powerful heritage he represents. The personal theme is placed in the context of the national family and the backdrop of impending civil war. Adams even accepts that tragic possibility (“And if it means civil war, then let it come”) to preserve the national union, the national family: “And when it does, may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.” The only flaw in this scene is Spielberg’s decision to underscore it with insipidly valorizing music by John Williams. The composer’s score, otherwise one of his best with its rich incorporation of African idioms, is an unnecessary distraction from Hopkins’s words. Not trusting words to carry a scene is a trap into which Spielberg sometimes falls.

D
AMAGED
by controversy,
Amistad
was a relative flop with its domestic gross of $44 million (on a production cost of $41 million) and was bypassed at the Oscars, receiving four nominations but no awards. But Spielberg’s next film,
Saving Private Ryan
(1998), a joint venture of DreamWorks and Paramount, became an unexpected box-office smash, grossing $479 million worldwide on a production cost of $65 million, and won him his second Academy Award. Spielberg had worried that the World War II movie, with its
overwhelmingly
intense and visceral early sequence depicting the D-Day invasion, would prove too painful for most audiences to bear, as, perhaps, had been the case with his evocation of slavery. He was “flabbergasted” by the popular
success
of
Ryan
, which vindicated his desire to “resensitize people to the realities” of war, as he had done in
Schindler’s List
. He said that in
Ryan
, “I’m asking the audience—and it’s a lot to ask of an audience—to have a physical experience, so that they can somewhat have the experience of what those guys actually went through.” The audience reaction vindicated the seriousness of his
mission
. By evoking the sacrifice and heroism of ordinary Americans so vividly,
Ryan
captured the Zeitgeist in a year of national reconciliation with father figures, the same year Tom Brokaw’s history of what he called
The Greatest Generation
became an influential best seller by eulogizing Americans who had lived through the Great Depression and fought the war against fascism.

“I made
Saving Private Ryan
for my father,” said Spielberg. “He’s the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up…. When I first read the script, I said, ‘My dad is going to love this movie.’” Arnold Spielberg had been a U.S. Army Air Forces radio operator in the China-Burma-India
Theater of operations. When Steven’s name was called as winner of the Oscar, he kissed his wife and hugged his father, with whom he had been so publicly at odds for many years. Their previous conflicts over Steven’s choice of a career, which the son exaggerated in memory, overlooking his father’s active encouragement of his early filmmaking efforts, were definitively buried by Steven’s gesture of paying cinematic tribute to his father’s generation of veterans.
Ryan
was an outgrowth of the process of reconciliation that culminated in
Amistad
. “Am I allowed to say I really wanted this?” Spielberg told the audience when he was handed the Oscar. He went on to declare, “Dad, you’re the greatest. Thank you for showing me that there is honor in looking back and respecting the past. I love you very much. This is for you.” Ironically, though Arnold
expressed
gratitude for the film, he complained that it was not about the war in Asia. So eventually Steven began planning a cable television miniseries called
The Pacific
(2010). He was an executive producer on the series with
Saving Private Ryan
star Tom Hanks, with whom he had collaborated in producing the 2001 World War II miniseries
Band of Brothers
, also set in the European campaign.

Steven’s reconciliation with his father in the late 1990s was such a
momentous
development in his life and work that it was chronicled by
Life
magazine in a 1999 cover story entitled “Steven Spielberg and His Dad: Healing a
15-Year
Rift.” Steven recalled how he had blamed his busy father for his frequent absences from home, particularly when they lived in Arizona, but recognized that Arnold made the effort to go with him on Boy Scout camping trips, “maybe the happiest memories of my childhood.” But his parents’ divorce and his resulting anger toward his father (even though, at the time, he blamed his mother more) created, he said, “a distance between us. And when my father remarried, it separated us even further. I didn’t like the person he married.” Steven stopped telephoning his father and “began looking for fathers” in other men, such as his “surrogate father figure” Steven J. Ross of Time Warner. “In my heart, I loved my dad. But resentment can build up layers and barriers, and I just felt more comfortable not thinking about it.”