Steven Spielberg finally makes it to my watchlist with Amistad. Amistad is one of his less known movies and thus also his most underrated. It’s a high-stakes court drama, based on the story of the Spanish slaver Amistad. As in real life, the slaves on board manage to slaughter most of the crew. The two surviving Spaniards, however, don’t take them back to Africa, but land in Connecticut. With the slave trade legal for Spain, but not America, there is a long legal battle. President Martin van Buren, seeking reelection, is worried that if the slaves are freed he’ll lose the southern vote, so he twice has the trial done again in a higher court. He also has to deal with the Spanish government, which insists that the slaves are their property and should be punished for killing most of the slavers.
The movie is chockfull of real historical characters and follows the events closely for the most part. The main character is Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), a man kidnapped and sold into slavery. The real Cinque actually had a different name that was anglicized into his more familiar one, but the movie simplifies things. His defense lawyer is Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), who was a well established legal figure in real life, but is turned into an ambitious low-level one to give us more of an underdog story. The big hurdle for the defense team is the language barrier, but gradually this is overcome with the discovery of James Covey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a sailor who was born in West Africa and knows some of the different tongues.
