Saturday 11 February 2017

Mission: Imposspielberg, Vol 6 - Boats and Bullets


After the relative disappointment of The Lost World, which was at best too light and fluffy to be of any real quality so the director took his eye off the ball, or at worst a cynical cash in, Spielberg got serious.  Amistad is one of the rare Spielberg films that I hadn’t previously seen before embarking on this insane project, and while it’s certainly not one I’ll be reaching for on a Saturday night, it’s important, handsome and well performed. It sits comfortably alongside Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Bridge Of Spies, Munich, and Lincoln as one of his ‘morality in immoral times’ films.

Amistad tells the 1839 story of a mutiny aboard the titular slave ship and the subsequent legal battle over the ownership of the people on board, and therefore the morality of ownership of a person in the context of pre-Revolutionary America.  Djimon Hounsou is on force-of-nature form as Sengbe Pieh, leader of the mutiny and figurehead of the legal case.  It’s a little patronising that he’s pretty much the only of the ‘slave’ population considered intelligent enough to speak at the trial, but Spielberg telegraphs the drama away from such concerns with a focus on how awful slavery was. 

There are strong performances across the board, with a post-A Time To Kill, pre-rom-com apocalypse Matthew McConaughey showing good form and Anthony Hopkins turning in what we now know to be a pretty standard ‘elder statesman’ performance as former president John Quincy Adams.  Oscar nominated at the time, Hopkins is impressive in his impassioned grandstanding, but as courtroom performances go, it’s no better than, say, Kevin Costner in JFK or McConaughey himself in A Time To Kill.  Hounsou is the star, his rage and humanity battling beneath the surface throughout.

No sensible person should need to have the fact that slavery was awful spelled out for them but Spielberg does an admirable job of highlighting the horrors.  We don’t feel remotely bad about the crewmen being murdered by the slaves; we celebrate the freed slaves’ victories; we feel incredulous at their treatment.  It’s such an obvious subject that the whole thing feels a little forced, but there’s skill in the telling of the story.  It’s easily slotted into the Spielberg canon alongside Lincoln as one of his well-meaning but preaching-to-the-choir films.  Yes, you don’t need to hear a passionate argument against slavery in The Land Of The Free, but sometimes passion gets you a lot way.

His career in danger of drying up somewhat in the years post-Schindler’s List, 1999 saw Spielberg rediscover his mojo with Saving Private Ryan.  Holding a special place in my heart as one of the films I remember seeing at Newcastle’s beautiful Odeon cinema before it closed, Ryan marks Spielberg’s 4th collaboration with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, but the first time Kaminski’s influence was really as great as that of the director.

Wrongly criticised for being a dull film bookended by two memorable actions sequences, Ryan’s style became the ubiquitous in WW2 films: imitated but never equalled, the brothers-in-arms quality of the roughly-drawn characters just enough to keep things interesting and make you care about them, and the shaky-camera style nothing short of visceral.  I started Mission: Imposspielberg to remind myself of how I felt about his films years after I first saw them, and I’m happy to report that Ryan has lost none of its power.

The Omaha beach sequence rightly hogged the headlines back in 1999.  As brutal as anything Spielberg has shot before or since, this depiction of the hell of war is heart-in-mouth stuff.  Named characters, led by Tom Hanks’ everyman Cap. Miller, are thrown into the breach on the beach, allowing us to see just enough of them as countless others are slain around them.  Ed Burns’ bland Noo Yawker, Giovanni Ribisi’s moral medic, Barry Pepper’s memorable sniper, and Tom Sizemore’s indestructible grunt are all introduced with the narrative economy befitting an ensemble war movie, all the while chaos reigns around them.

The Brothers In Arms road movie format works well, Matt Damon’s Ryan an increasingly inaccessible MacGuffin (‘Saving Major MacGuffin’, presumably a rejected early draft), while a fine supporting cast (including Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti, Dennis Farina) help to ease things along.  It all builds, of course, to a stunning climactic battle, with a seriously tooled-up German battalion attacking an under-staffed U.S. Army outpost.  Ryan earns his stripes and the respect of the cast, Damon doing good work and, a rising star at the time, well cast as the dutiful GI.

Spielberg’s visual invention is unleashed throughout, but it’s the quiet, subtle moments rather than the grandiose battle scenes that steal the thunder.  A reflection in the window as a military procession arrives at Mrs. Ryan’s house, a captured German troop digging his own grave in silhouette; these are the moments that give the film heart, as well as Tom Hanks’ restrained performance.  His first collaboration with Spielberg, his humanity grounds the film (in a way that, say, Brad Pitt in Fury doesn’t), allowing the quirks of the ensemble cast do their thing, and reminding us that there’s a real person in the middle of the horror.


This is one of my favourite Spielberg films and watching it again after a good few years just reminds me of why.  It absolutely nails everything a war movie should have: a great ensemble cast (like Cross Of Iron, or The Great Escape), dehumanising horrors (The Big Red One, Full Metal Jacket), but a strong human core (Paths Of Glory, The Deer Hunter).  Spielberg’s often maligned, occasionally twee tendency towards soft-focus Hollywood-isms meets his sometimes-seen penchant for the visceral headlong and the results are rightly Oscar-winning.