Watching men from a neighboring tribe snare Cinque in a coarse net and drag him off to a slave fortress, you think, "Of course, that's how it happened." The pressurized account of his voyage doesn't leave you the emotional space to think; you can only feel along with Cinque the dehumanizing horror of people chained, starved, flogged, and drowned. The most profound moment of the film may be when Cinque exchanges glances with a woman holding a baby, right before she leaps into the drink. Did she take his glance as approval? Did he believe he could persuade her to keep on struggling to live? Cinque himself becomes unmoored; slavery divides not only races from each other, and men and women from their natural bonds, but also individuals from their deepest selves.
The final portion of the film links up philosophically with that atrocity and gives Amistad its full measure of spiritual grandeur. Martin Van Buren, catering to the South in an election year (his campaign train is a beaut, like a toy choo-choo from childhood), makes sure the case is carried to a Supreme Court stacked with Southern sympathizers. But the august John Quincy Adams decides to join the defense. And Adams knows that he must base his case on the ethical cornerstone of the nation -- the insistence in the very Declaration of Independence on man's "inalienable rights."
Hopkins is sensational as the physically twisted, emotionally vinegary, mentally luminous Adams. He's equally effective as a listener and an orator. When Cinque tells Adams that in moments of truth, he calls into the past for his ancestors to help him -- "and they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all" -- Hopkins' craggy intellectual rapture tells you that his own ancestors, especially John Adams, his father, have grown ever closer to him. When Hopkins delivers Adams' address before the court, Hopkins uses every actor's trick to make his speech seem spontaneous, down to the way he wraps his fingers on a rail against the rhythm of his words (and of the incessant music). But what's most important is that he conveys the conviction of a statesman -- democracy is the air he breathes. The writers have taken bits and pieces of Adams' own words and ideas and skillfully modernized and refined them, but Hopkins' fervor makes them sound simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. When he addresses his forefathers -- the Founding Fathers -- and prays that a civil war, if it comes, "may be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution," he brings the body of the film to a glorious conclusion. Hopkins reminds me of what poet/critic James Agee said of an obscure actor in a forgotten historical film: "He looks like a daguerreotype, not an impersonation." The entire movie is like that. To steal a phrase from another poet/critic, Randall Jarrell, Spielberg visualizes historical events so that they occur for the first time -- and to you.
