The Big Picture: Spielberg chained to mediocrity

Amistad

Amistad, Steven Spielberg, 15

The good Spielberg/bad Spielberg complex has been with us almost as long as he has been directing movies. His work since 1985 may not support claims of genius, but until that point he had demonstrated the erratic variance in quality that is a mark of the restless artist. It was as though one prosaic movie functioned as penance for the wistful poetry of another.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the director's new picture, Amistad, is that it displays neither the yearning of his best work nor the misdirected emotion of his worst. Good Spielberg and bad Spielberg have been relieved of their duties by mediocre Spielberg, the director who can make a historical event of passion and complexity feel like an extract from John Grisham's rough notebook.

That isn't to say that he doesn't know where to point a camera. The opening sequence of the film, in which a slave-ship's cargo slaughter their captors, provides the perfect opportunity for Spielberg to indulge his appetite for overwrought spectacle. Although the stroboscopic flashes of lightning that accompany the mutiny suggests an epic battle of good and evil, the violence is depicted with a blunt cruelty that recalls the climax of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, another film in which white oppression leads to black rebellion.

Both movies travel a similar path, but in opposite directions. Whereas Jimmie's violence is shown to be a response to the indignities he has suffered, the cutlass attack by Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) upon the captain of the ship occurs in the first scene, deliberately placed before we have had an opportunity to absorb context or motivation. Cinque draws the long, sleek blade out of the man's chest like Arthur extracting Excalibur. Across the deck, his fellow slaves are taking machetes to the rest of the crew, skipping the hanging and drawing parts and moving straight on to the quartering.

For the first half hour, the slaves are depicted as monsters. In a conversation conducted in the Mende dialect between Cinque and the crew member whose life he has spared, only the white man's dialogue is subtitled. Not until the slaves are recaptured and transported to New Haven to stand trial for murder are we gradually permitted to enter their world. As they stand chained and naked in the streets, a coach and horses passes by, driven by a dignified-looking black man. One of the slaves calls out "brother" to him; he does not respond. There are other culture shocks to come, but the film plays them for laughs, eavesdropping on Cinque as he sees a church choir kneeling and presumes that they are preparing to throw up.

Eventually the lawyer who is defending the slaves, Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), locates an interpreter, which is advantageous both for the fluidity of Baldwin's argument in court, and for the commercial potential of the movie. It seems churlish to make a film arguing for equality and freedom, and then whip up a rejoicing fanfare each time the African hero masters another word of English. The writer, David Franzoni, is more interested in the character of the ex-president John Quincey Adams (Anthony Hopkins) who ultimately wins the case for the slaves, than he is in Cinque, whose status in the screenplay is no less mute and symbolic than it is in the courtroom. With his reputation and production company, it is not so inconceivable that Spielberg should be able to show a black struggle from a black perspective, rather than filtering it through white experiences.

He almost manages it at one point, allowing us to absorb the court case from Cinque's perspective - hearing the muffled alien language on which his freedom hangs, noticing the sweat on the palms of a key defendant, or the American flag billowing outside the window in sinister slow motion. This impressive sequence of shots culminates in Cinque chanting the words "Give us free", and the film seems to be arguing that there is emancipation in mastering the language of your oppressor. This is reinforced in one of the last scenes, when Cinque and Baldwin swap words from each other's language like footballers trading shirts at the end of a match. But which team has scored the winning goal?

The music leaves you in little doubt. It's bad enough that Spielberg should still be promoting the banal compositions of John Williams, but the simplistic way he assigns themes to the characters is reminiscent of old spy capers that greeted Japanese characters with the sound of a gong. Any scene featuring Adams is awash with a plaintive arrangement of strings, while shots of Cinque are accompanied by a rumble of tribal drums, or an African chant. By the end, Adams's signature theme has engulfed Cinque's; though the slaves have won their freedom, the white characters remain victorious in the battle for soundtrack space.

For a film which concerns itself with issues of ownership, Amistad fights shy of addressing the nature of its own claims on the slaves' story. There is some unintentionally hilarious symbolism raised through Adams's passion for gardening - the camera fixes on him carefully moving a plant from the shadows into sunlight to enable it to thrive, and he gets to babble some analogous nonsense about an African violet that he unveils in his greenhouse for Cinque. If importing that violet into America allowed it to continue blooming whilst enriching its new surroundings, then you might ask how this dramatisation of 1830s civil rights history will nourish the indigenous flora of the 20th century. Cinque is a bland, purified soul, as palatable and featureless as the bleached-out aliens who flood the screen at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Insurrection never went down so smooth.

RYAN GILBY'S TOP 5

1 LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN

2 THE ICE STORM

3 THE BUTCHER BOY

4 THE UGLY

5 SICK