Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #27: Lincoln (2012)

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was one of his long-running projects. Earlier on, it was to be a more general biopic with Liam Neeson as the famed Abraham Lincoln. By the time it finally swung into proper production, however, Neeson dropped out and Daniel Day-Lewis took his place. Wisely, Spielberg also abandoned the idea of a film covering years, if not decades, of Lincoln’s life, a common mistake of biopics that results in unfocused, hole-ridden storylines. Instead he zeroed in on the president’s attempt to get the 13^th Amendment passed in the House of Representatives.

The 13^th Amendment was to end slavery once and for all in the United States. It was the culmination of years of policy development during the Civil War. Though he hated slavery, Lincoln knew he could not abolish it and instead had supported the Republican Party’s views of preventing its expansion into new territories. As the war progressed, however, the Union Army and Federal government could not ignore the fact that slave labor fueled the Confederacy, so runaway slaves were accepted as “contraband” enemy property. By 1865 many now believed that slavery had to be abolished, whether out of moral concerns or the pragmatic belief that it would result in more strife down the road.

The 13^th Amendment is opposed by various Democrats and some of the more conservative Republicans. A greater threat is a Confederate peace commission. If slavery’s continued existence in a restored Union ensures that a long, bloody war can finally end right now, many in the House will see the 13^th as a guaranteed war to keep the body count going. Many historians disputed the central conflict of Lincoln, arguing that there was no way slavery could remain intact after the Civil War, even if the amendment initially failed to pass.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #15: Amistad (1997)

 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.