Ships in the night.

'Amistad' & 'Titanic'

Well in advance of Amistad's release, the mills of publicity let us know that this film would confirm the new maturity Steven Spielberg had displayed in Schindler's List. But it seems to me that what is great in the new movie (and some of it is great) resembles the sort of daydream a bright child might have right after an exciting history lesson. What Spielberg has wrought is much simpler than what a sophisticated director like Bruce Beresford might produce. It doesn't have the moral complexity and layered characterizations of Beresford's Breaker Morant or the sense that the past is truly another country that made Black Robe and King David so excitingly strange. And certainly in Beresford's hands a multifaceted figure like Henry Clay wouldn't have been presented as the straightforward villain that Spielberg gives us.

Yet, if the Amistad we've got is relatively simple (except for the director's technical virtuosity), even naive, parts of it are as unforgettable as the best illustrations (by N.C. Wyeth, say, or Leonard Everett Fisher) in a child's classic. Only a great image-maker could have created the opening sequence of the revolt of the abducted Africans and their frustrated attempt to sail the slave ship Amistad back to their homeland in Sierra Leone.

The very first shot, a shadowy closeup of the revolt's leader, Cinque (embodied by the immensely imposing Djimon Hounsou), as he strains to pick the lock of his chains, gives us an unforgettable picture of fettered strength, a sort of black Samson Agonistes, that both encapsulates the horror of slavery and alerts us to the fury about to explode. The staging of the ensuing battle is everything it should be: exciting, sufficiently bloody, both exhilarating and foreboding. And the following scenes of the attempt to get the Amistad back to Africa (with two hostage Spanish slavers covertly deflecting it toward North America) are eerily beautiful, especially the nocturnal moment when the slave ship, lights doused to conceal its identity, crosses paths with a European vessel, aboard which well-coifed, wealthy passengers are enjoying a string quartet on deck. In a tableau worthy of Gericault, a little piece of Europe and a little piece of Africa silently regard each other in starlight on the Atlantic Ocean. The first twenty minutes of Amistad are sheer magic.

But once the Africans are captured by American sailors and brought to Connecticut for the first of three trials, the movie never again attains that level of sustained wonderment. How could it? The first twenty minutes is all adventure and physical excitement - the very aspect of history that a child revels in - while the rest of the movie is concerned with trials, treaties, evidence, oratory, political conniving, crises of conscience, the letter and spirit of the law. This is the stuff of the adult world, and Spielberg can only transform bits and pieces of this world into the material of his unique internal wonderland. The good citizen is awake inside the director but only intermittently feeds the dreaming child-artist. So, by fits and starts, Amistad grips and enchants. The rest of it is mildly interesting professional filmmaking.

Aside from the opening, most of the best moments express the bewilderment, horror, and wonder the Africans feel at being transported to a New England that, for them, might as well be the far side of the moon. Seeing a freed black drive a buggy through the streets of New London, the prisoners feel they are looking at a chief in his royal chariot. Trying to understand the white man's religion, Cinque and a friend study the illustrations in a New Testament, perceive the horror and power of Christ's Crucifixion, and are then alarmed, as they are herded to court, to see how masts in the harbor resemble huge crosses. Later, his gaze wandering over the courtroom and taking in several objects at random - a naval officer's epaulet, a cane resting on a gentlemanly knee - Cinque feels a revulsion verging on nausea. The sheer foreignness of this world into which he has been hurled torments him. Spielberg's achievement (aided by the blue-gray chill of Janusz Kaminski's photography) is to make us understand how crushing our civilization can be to a victim of it.

The weakest element is the presentation of the legal developments, or rather lack of developments, in the three trials. Judging strictly by what we are shown (the facts might yield a different impression), all the defense could do at all three sessions was to hammer away at the point that the defendants were captured in the country of Sierra Leone, a protectorate of England where the slave trade was forbidden. And all the prosecution could do was to keep insisting that the provenance of the defendants' capture was unknown, that they were strictly property and should be returned to their Spanish owners. Although Spielberg and his scriptwriters (David Franzoni and the uncredited Steven Zaillian) show us clearly why the government of Martin Van Buren kept prosecuting - the president was bowing to the pressure of the slave-owning states - neither the court proceedings nor the behind-the-scenes politicking achieve any high dramatic interest.

Of course, the deus ex machina waiting to descend at the climactic third trial is John Quincy Adams. Because of the lack of dramatic progress in the courtroom scenes, the moviemakers must work up artificial suspense by trying to make us wonder if the Great Man will intervene or not. Well, of course he does! And just in time for Anthony Hopkins (as Adams) to save us from Matthew McConaughey's feeble efforts as the principal defense lawyer (and future governor of Connecticut) Roger Baldwin. (Responding to a favorable verdict at one of the earlier trials, McConaughey leaps to his feet punching the air and shouting "yes!" Why didn't the actor also wear a turned-around baseball cap while he was at it?) Hopkins gives an excellent impersonation of a vinegary genius, and the careful little gestures he uses during Adams's oratory seem the neat, canny reductions of the sweeping gestures the statesman might have made in his prime. Yet Hopkins seemed to me to be toiling uphill because every time he appears the soundtrack is invaded by a musical motif redolent of patriotism, duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and composed by Mr. Fourth of July himself, John Williams). This trumpet accompaniment is faint but persistent; it piously glazes every word Adams utters and it enshrines, embalms, canonizes the old statesman while poor Hopkins is simply trying to bring him to life.

I understand the intention. That musical figure represents not only Adams's greatness but the greatness of his ancestors and all the patriots who founded our country. And, in an earlier scene, much is made of the way the tradition-proud Adams empathizes with Cinque who speaks of himself as the summation of his ancestors. But Spielberg allows the greatness of Cinque to emanate from Djimon Hounsou himself. Why did he burden Hopkins with a musical crutch?

It comes from the need to have the cavalry ride to the rescue of the wagon train, to see the three musketeers defeat Richelieu's agents and rescue the queen's jewels, to conjure up children riding their bikes to the rescue of a cute little buddy from another planet. In short, Amistad, despite its R rating (the slaveship sequences necessarily feature full frontal nudity and the sexual exploitation of the African women), is essentially a children's movie, a heroic romance culled from history.

I never thought I could be so happy at the sight of an iceberg! Before it sank into the Atlantic, the ship Titanic split in half. Artistically speaking, so does Titanic, the movie. The first ninety minutes is Harlequin romance drivel starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a bohemian artist and Kate Winslet as a society debutante who cross class barriers to fall in love. The dialogue is clunky and anachronistic, the camera work conventional at best, at worst faux lyrical (360-degree panning around embracing lovers and that sort of thing). DiCaprio is clueless as to how a working-class boy of 1912 would move and speak, though Winslet remains fetching under 9.5 pounds of make-up.

But once that blessed frozen mountain appears, this movie goes uphill faster than the ship goes under. It's all here: the invading water and the escaping rats, the class warfare enacted over places in the lifeboats, the homicidal rages and the gallantry, the surrenders to death alongside the furious scrambling to escape it, the dimming of the lights and the undimmed music of the ship's orchestra, the dull roar of sinking steel and the shrill roar of panicked humanity, the shattering of the ship's spine followed by a great silence: the stillness of slow death in the water, the stillness of desolated survivors in the boats. Writer-director James Cameron captures everything with mastery of special effects and the deployment of a superb supporting cast. (Victor Garber is especially touching as the ship's guilt-stricken architect.) I've never seen the serendipity of catastrophe captured so well, the way the choice of running down one corridor rather than another can lead to life or death. And what I'm tempted to call moral serendipity is also touched upon: the way the same situation can call forth the best and worst in an individual. (Witness the behavior of the chief steward who enforces the vile rule of preferring the first-class passengers for the lifeboats, but who draws the line at allowing a millionaire to bribe his way ahead of women and children.)

Titanic will win the best-picture Oscar this year, but it is strictly in its second-half that James Cameron becomes the one-and-only poet of disaster movies.

RELATED ARTICLE: The battle for words

Set in 1839, the plot of Amistad is not only about the mutiny of fifty-three African slaves on board ship off the coast of Long Island and their subsequent judicial perils, but to an equal extent it is about translation: about being isolated in one's own linguistic cell. Almost a sixth of the dialogue in Amistad is in Mende, the African tongue spoken by the film's hero, Cinque, and his tribe. English subtitles are used sporadically, when their meaning advances the storyline. Otherwise, viewers are left in the dark, foreigners lost in the obscurity of ignorance. This helps generate a feeling of impotence and frustration, typical of the tourist traveling in alien lands: we know something is being said, perhaps even about us, but nothing else. By the time Cinque is defended by John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court, a translator, perfectly bilingual in Mende and English, has been found.

That a Hollywood film takes a risk of alienating a considerable portion of its public by introducing a foreign language (Dances with Wolves did so successfully) is commendable. But even more meritorious here is the role the translator is called to play. In a desperate search, the real-estate lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey and the black abolitionist played by Morgan Freeman find a Mende speaker, having themselves memorized the decimal numbers in Mende and shouted them out loud while walking around the piers. Soon the translator becomes a central character. A one-time slave, not only is he capable of understanding Cinque and the other slaves, but he is the only one capable of opening up substantial trust between them and the lawyers, between Africans and Americans. A friendship is forged.

Unlike Cinque, the translator is presented as unimposing, even a bit shady. Yet he too is a hero, a language wizard who translates not word-byword but meaning-by-meaning. He is the perfect embodiment of what Italians describe as a traduttore, traditore. Not that he is a traitor; on the contrary, his talent as an interpreter allows for enormous creativity as an artist, architect, and healer. For in Amistad, it is the translator who allows two civilizations, American and African, to find each other.

Amistad is one of the few films in recent memory to introduce an interpreter as a full-fledged character. That is sad, since translators have been prime protagonists in the clash between civilizations. Imperialism and translation go hand in hand. To conquer geographically is to dominate verbally, and the history of Western colonialism is also the history of a handful of powerful languages eclipsing scores of weaker ones. In the last segment of the film, Cinque learns some broken English, screaming, "Give us free! Give us free!" By the end, he is able to communicate with Adams, albeit "primitively" - a term not without imperialistic undertones. Adams too is capable, in the film's grand finale, of a minimal grasp of Mende. The translator has thereupon become unnecessary.

Ilan Stavans teaches in the Department of Romance Languages at Amherst College.