Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2012)

Matthew McConaughey enters as the titular hitman in Killer Joe literally coated in leather, clad in hide gloves, jacket and boots. It is one of the film's countless, indelible grindhouse moments, the man so defined by killing that even his wardrobe comprises death. On McConaughey, this dark outfit announces the arrival of a wolf in sheep's clothing (or cow's, as it were). The law never fares well in William Friedkin's films, where police detectives always morph into the very forces they hunt so obsessively. Killer Joe picks up where those other films end: Joe Cooper enters the film a monster, and the only thing close to a mitigating factor in his behavior is that the people who enlist his services may be even more repulsive.

Taking place in cramped trailers, run-down streets on the side of the railroad tracks that time forgot, and strip clubs lit in the electric zapper blues of Friedkin's last film, Bug, Killer Joe erects a world so white-trash that it could contain any redneck. Well, almost any redneck, for the film populates itself with such extreme Southern-fried types that they clash as violently with this setting as they would in Beverly Hills. Friedkin wastes no time establishing the lunacy of his dramatis personae, with debt-ridden drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) beating on a trailer door in the dead of night as the film opens, only to be greeted by a close-up of Gina Gershon's bottomless, be-merkined unmentionables. Vulgarity and casual domestic violence ensues. But Gershon plays Chris' stepmom, Sharla, and she gets off light compared to how Chris views his biological mother. To him, the latter is just a hefty life insurance policy waiting to be collected and the answer his problems with his drug supplier. When he offers to cut the rest of the family in on the loot, no one raises any objection to the idea of having the woman killed, not even the seeming bundle of innocence, Chris' teen sister Dottie (Juno Temple).

This, as it turns out, is the tame part of the film. Having found such agreeable chemistry with playwright Tracy Letts' words and subject matter with Bug, the two seem even more attuned with each other in Joe, where Letts' grotesque characters mesh beautifully with Friedkin's nasty direction. He tends to shoot in medium and medium close-up, pushing the viewer deeper into the depraved violence and lurid sex. (Films can get a NC-17 rating just for having too much nudity. Killer Joe wraps its nudity in incestuous desires and underage sex, practically daring the MPAA to invent an even stricter rating to deal with it.) Swooning camera movements only exacerbate the sense of discomfort as Friedkin constantly reels toward and away (but not nearly away enough) from the character's schemes and abhorrent behavior.

Intimacy is a hallmark of Friedkin's style, though it is often of the sort that ultimately pushes people away. The tracking shots in the gay clubs of Cruising moved horizontally but always felt like a descent into hell for Pacino's protagonist, who never has a clear break in morphing from hero to villain but gradually becomes so monstrous that the audience only realizes what is happening when escape is impossible. In The French Connection's climax, Doyle kills the federal agent hounding his extreme measures rather than the drug smuggler, though by that point one cannot say whether this is a grotesque accident or a seized opportunity. Killer Joe likewise, plunges into its filth, to the point that you can practically smell the smoke-infused walls and cheap beer stains on the carpet of the Smith's trailer. Ironic distance just ain't Friedkin's bag, though in a way that is a good thing. A long shot in this film is the only thing more unbearable than the more proximal shots. It gives clarity to that which is excruciating enough in piecemeal.

In a way, Killer Joe serves as the inverse of another immaculately composed, Texan black comic thriller, the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. (McConaughey in particular left such a strong impression that, for a brief second, I even thought he acted in the other film until I remembered I was thinking of the Woody Harrelson role.) Their film went medium-to-long shot to Friedkin's medium-close-to-even-closer, stepping away from the action to take stock of the sad waste of the violence. It meshed perfectly with Cormac McCarthy's spare but universal writing, using its critical separation to make harrowing observations on the perpetuity of human violence. Killer Joe contents itself to stick with its characters, not tying them to a larger fabric but following their demented arc so closely that the audience cannot be extricated from what it sees.

And it's all held together by McConaughey, who turns the Sheriff Bell character from No Country into Anton Chigurh. He rarely raises his voice, and from the second he meets his new employers, gears begin turning behind his eyes as he makes contingency plans if—no, scratch that, when—Chris does not follow through on his end of the bargain. Joe never asks for anything; he merely says what he will take. Instantly gauging the likelihood of collecting payment for this job, Joe informs Chris and Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) that he will take Dottie as a "retainer" for his services until they can raise his fee. So matter of factly does McConaughey announce this news that neither brother nor father raises an objection. But the degree of gentility the actor adds to Joe's controlling, sadistic side during his "date" with Dottie makes his domineering presence even worse. It dresses up Joe in a mask of decency that confuses the poor girl as his polite, understanding behavior during dinner gives way to softly spoken but firm commands to obey him.

McConaughey has such a profound effect on the other characters that they react to him in distinct ways. Temple nearly steals the movie from McConaughey with her airy calm that mixes two parts naïveté with one part shining. The actress' sharp, angled canines have always lent her smiles an equal element of baby-teeth cuteness and serrated warning, and she has never played up that ambiguity so well. When they first meet, Joe sits at a table in the position closest to the camera, his black clothing rippling out across the left side of the frame as he stretches out lethargically to wait for his clients to arrive. Dottie, meanwhile, curls into a vertical line, folding her legs up to her torso and sitting bolt upright; even her hair stands up in an awkward bunch. This posturing makes her hard to read, harder still when she begins asking forthright questions about Joe's killings with a tone that balances on a knife edge between open curiosity and barely concealed bloodlust. Joe never looks so  ever again, but this little girl has clearly rattled something in his unflappable core.

That core is on full display, however, with the other members of the Smith family. Chris' eyes dart over the man and his voice trembles as he perpetually weighs whom he fears more, the mob boss about to kill him or the killer who can deliver him from his fate. Like a caged animal, Chris slowly grows bolder with Joe as his desperation mounts, but this only increases his chances of death. Ansel, who does not have to fret about the mob, can devote all his attention to fearing Joe, often saying and moving as little as possible in the man's presence as if the killer were a T-Rex, unable to spot you if you stand perfectly still. Sharla, poor Sharla, seems to feel at ease around Joe, perhaps overconfident that she could twirl him around her pinky like every other man in her life. That assumption costs her dearly in the film's climax, in which a chicken leg is used to push the comedy into full horror. A caesura that comes on a wave of bloodletting is, despite its final gag of a cliffhanger, a blessed relief from the nightmare. The best Friedkin films never really conclude anyway; they just finally let you out of the chokehold.

Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

In retrospect, the links between Steven Soderbergh's male stripper movie Magic Mike and The Girlfriend Experience, his 2009 experiment starring a porn star as a high-end prostitute, should have been obvious. Both, in true Soderbergh fashion, explore their unorthodox sex-centric milieux, the director's older film about how the commodification of woman's sexuality, this new one about that of man's. If one plays out as a probing drama and the other a wry comedy, that only speaks to how society perceives the sexuality of the sexes and what is considered a lamentable, if common, situation for one gender and an escapist dream for the other.

Yet Magic Mike, for its many laughs, has as much to say about current economic realities as Soderbergh's Sasha Grey vehicle, which was made in the thick of Wall Street collapse and reflects that panic. Where that film captured a moment, this one exists in the aftermath of a radically shaken-up world. As the titular stud, Channing Tatum represents the post-collapse reality, that of a Millennial with ambitious but ridiculous dreams who must constantly defer his goal with various odd jobs to pay the bills. Working construction or stripping may not be a series of unpaid internships, but their purpose is the same: to offer an increasingly slim hope for a shot at the American Dream.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin present Mike's situation as a combination of factors within and outside his control. An early scene shows him working as a roof tiler for a construction company that hires people on Craigslist to skirt union workers and keep wages almost criminally low. Not only that, a supervisor accuses one man of theft for taking two Pepsis for lunch, when the daily allotment is one. And when Mike takes a hefty cash down payment to a bank to get a loan for his dream business, a custom furniture maker that turns salvage into tables, only to be turned down because he has no credit. "I read the newspapers," he says evenly but angrily at the bank assistant who weakly protests his assets, "and the only thing that's depressed is y'all." The recession is not the only thing holding Mike back, however: as hard as he works to save up for his business, he also rewards himself lavishly. He lives in a two-story apartment and drives a new truck that still sports the plastic on the interior, albeit only because Mike thinks this preserves the element of newness. Mike spends so much that after six years of working multiple jobs, he only has about $13,000 saved up.

But as much as Mike's life speaks to the realities of the recession, created and perpetuated by both personal and social irresponsibility and greed, Magic Mike, like any other Soderbergh movie, cares more for the process of its subject matter than the themes it inspires. The aforementioned Pepsi "thief," Adam (Alex Pettyfer), gives the audience an entry point into the male stripping world when he finds himself literally thrust on-stage after a particularly odd day. As Adam, a.k.a. "The Kid," settles into this new realm, he receives instruction not only from Mike but from Dallas (Matthew McConaughey, the egomaniacal impresario of the strip club where all the banana hammock-swinging action takes place. McConaughey's coaching is deliberately absurd, but in his macho pep talk and narcissistic grinding in a mirror is a clarification of the rules and practices of this profession.

In The Girlfriend Experience, Grey's Chelsea/Christine touts the in-depth experience she offers clients, but outside of the scenes in which we see her in some state of undress, all she really has to do is hold a conversation and be a comforting shoulder. Such is the extent of the straight man's idea of a girlfriend: a woman just smart enough to agree with him and nonjudgmental enough to let him cry before or after (or while?) he mounts her. Mike and the other strippers, on the other hand, engage in an openly simplistic act, but one that, according to Dallas, allows the customers to project their wildest, most intricate erotic fantasies. In stereotypical sailor/cowboy/cop outfits are unexpectedly complex turn-ons, especially when married to genuine, occasionally thrilling dance choreography. With a handful of dialogue, the characters suggest a profession that inverts the ostensible complexity and banal reality of The Girlfriend Experience into an elaborate, (mostly) contact-free erogenous feat that brings out the depths of the mind's lascivious imagination.

Not to be left out, Soderbergh's impeccable, always unexpected framing likewise establishes this world. He places ample space between a shot's focal character(s) and everyone else, emphasizing the barrier and pedestal that separates the performers from the screaming, clapping women who come to see them, as well as how that barrier is deliberately bent and redrawn as part of the performance. And among Soderbergh's talents for reflecting and subverting genre behavior, one can now add dance to the list of things the director can shoot competently and originally, alongside martial arts, heists and extended monologues. By now it is common knowledge that the film is loosely based on Tatum's own experiences as a stripper, and Soderbergh lets the actor show off the moves he retained. The film makes clear that the choreography of each strip routine is essential to the overall effect on the customer, so the director allows the audience to actually see it. Even when he cuts around the dances—or ends before a sword leaves its sheath and slaps the film with an NC-17 rating—Soderbergh keeps the sequences clear and judiciously edited and framed.

Then there are simply the shots that impress so much I cannot let them pass without comment. Ever since the metatextual confessional style of his debut Sex, lies & videotape, Soderbergh has found new and interesting way to frame faces, and he delights in off-kilter framings here. When Mike lures a gaggle of young women and Adam to his strip club near the start, Soderbergh frames all their faces in a tiny patch of space in the lower-left foreground and leaves the rest of the ample, 2:35:1 frame open, if in shallow focus, to show bar patrons dancing in blurs behind them. The first time we see Mike drive, Soderbergh leaves the camera outside the truck's rear pointing forward, leaving a chunk of the vehicle in the frame as it peers around front; I honestly do not think I've ever seen a driving scene shot like this. Even the use of title cards for each month is inspired, employed as they are in a manner reminiscent to Éric Rohmer's use of date cards as their own fleet, wry punchlines.

So effective and clever are his cutaways to those cards that I did not immediately correlate them to actual time passing. If Magic Mike shares anything with Soderbergh's Contagion (other than that sickly yellow filter that appears to be his new default color tone), it is in the display of how quickly everything can spiral out of control. The saga of two strippers may operate on a smaller scale than that of a global pandemic, but the basic principle remains the same. Even so, it's undeniable that Magic Mike's weakest element is its over-familiar plot, with shades of Boogie Nights and every other showbiz fable about a rising and falling star, complete with reversals of the ascendant and declining performer. It is amusing that a film that belatedly spoofs the unimaginative male perception of women in The Girlfriend Experience should itself saddle its two most prominent women, Adam's sister/Mike's love interest Brooke (Cody Horn) and Mike's friend-with-benefits Joanna (Olivia Munn), with the most undercooked roles. Still more amusing that both nearly steal the film. Munn gives a surprisingly touching performance with her chunks of mostly jokey screentime, a woman who simultaneously finds escape with Mike and is reminded of how quickly she needs to grow up whenever she's with him. Horn plays the opposite role, that of the serious-minded sister who maintains her maturity but also warms to Mike as the film progresses. Horn pulls off the rare effect of loosening up to the immature, hunky protagonist without completely unraveling for him.

Nevertheless, Pettyfer and especially Tatum sell this tired story with conviction, and Tatum proves yet again he can carry a comedy. Witty in his debonair fast-talking and endearingly ridiculous when his façade fails and he falls into stammering clumsiness, Tatum even manages to recall, if only vaguely, Cary Grant's ability to be the epitome of put-together manliness and a total wreck at the same time. That I see even a homeopathic amount of Grant in Tatum would be bewildering to myself only a year ago, but complete with his textured bit part in Soderbergh's other 2012 feature Haywire, and his physically comic work in 21 Jump Street, Tatum is on a roll. And speaking of rolls, McConaughey may be entering the best phase of his career. Of all the immaculately and uniquely framed faces in the film, none is more frequently hysterical than McConaughey's. He so effortlessly embodies Dallas' creepy, pathetic self-absorption that a shot of a marble bust modeled after his own head is less a sight gag than a logical ornament in his home. But as silly as McConaughey is, he also imbibes the spirit of the corrupt business leader, building everything on the backs of his workers and then kicking out some of the rungs of the social ladder to ensure none can approach his position. This is simultaneously one of the actor's funniest, and darkest, performances to date.

Who could have expected to see so much of contemporary society and American youth in Magic Mike? Any undergrad or fresh graduate will know all too well Brooke's marketer boyfriend (screenwriter Carolin), the sort of person with whom one comes into contact when looking for some work, any work, outside a preferred career path. There are many, many good, personable, helpful people in sales, but anyone who has fished those waters will have met at least one Paul, a young, privileged man who established himself in a bum economy and has let that feed his ego. Unable to talk about anything but business and money, Paul condescends to everyone and treats his uninspiring work not as a means of personal satisfaction with a job well done but as a mere sign of status. The scene in which Paul, Adam and Brooke have drinks lasts no more than a minute or two, but an entire way of life is captured in seconds. Elsewhere, Magic Mike offers an indirect but crystalline snapshot of the state healthcare and emergency costs, where all one's savings can disappear in a flash with one freak occurrence. Funny, gorgeously shot and a vicarious thrill for most of its audience, Magic Mike is nevertheless the finest summary of Generation Y yet produced. Not bad for a film with a protracted penis pump sight gag.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

In its own way, the opening segment of Amistad is every bit as brilliant, dynamic and self-contained as the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Keeping cinematographer Kimenski on board, Spielberg frame the uprising on the titular ship in shocking terms. It starts with extreme close-ups of the face of Cinqué (Djimon Honsou), a slave bound for Cuba, breathing laboriously and clearly struggling. Cut to another extreme close-up of his fingers scraping at the wood of his bench in an attempt to free the nail, the jaw-clenching squeaks across wood deafening in the silence of the rocking ship at night. Lightning flashes (divorced from any masking thunder) illuminate chipped fingernails and bleeding tips. The suspense is as unbearable as any shot of Jews hiding from Nazis.

At last, Cinqué frees himself and releases the other captives, who storm the ship and slaughter the Spanish crew. The same lightning that showed us the slave freeing himself also reveal yet cover up the bloodbath. Spielberg shows glimpses of the violence, flashes of beastly faces in fearsome war yells. The fury is terrible to behold, and Cinqué only just manages to stop himself from killing the final two crew members, aware that he needs them to steer him home. The whole sequence is one of Spielberg's finest moments, playing on his love of Judeo-Christian imagery (of slaves coming out of bondage via the removal of a nail in wood that has direct Christian connotations) and his ability to make something visceral out of moral drama. Were it not such a pure demonstration of humanity's primal urge to survive and assert free will, one might call the animalistic visions of rampaging blacks at least subconsciously racist. Compared to the borderline stereotypical posturing of the actors in The Color Purple, these depictions are prouder and more defiant.

Such depictions are also clarified through the film's later structure, which does not move in easy chronological order but contextualizes what we see in retrospect so we never glory in what's happening. Even when it seems all is won and even the characters cheer in victory, Spielberg is waiting to pull back and reveal the full scope of the issue at hand. It's a clear response to those who felt he focused on the "success story" of the Schindler Jews at the expense of the six million less-fortunate souls.

The rest of the film relies on considerably less showy direction than the opening -- it is a courtroom drama, after all -- but Spielberg manages to maintain his usual penchant for visual storytelling with more static shots. The first 20 minutes or so contain nary a word of English and few subtitles, placing the heft of narrative building solely on Spielberg's camera. With nothing more than the right distance and angle, Spielberg manages to eke out not only what's happening but an emotional current for it. Cinqué spares the two officers and orders the one who understands Mende to turn around and head back to Africa. We see Cinqué's pride and leadership skills as he interacts with other Mende, but we also get a glimpse of how out of his element he is: when he briefly plays with the ship's helm he seems almost childlike. Slowly, the director drops hints of trouble: food runs scarce and the slave ship keeps sailing past vessels with white people on them. At last, when they run aground and some of the rebel slaves go to fetch water, it becomes clear they couldn't be stopping on land at all if they were really on their way back over the Atlantic.

Sure enough, the slaves are captured by an American frigate and placed in jail in Connecticut. When they arrive, the white prisoners protest having to share so much as the same room with the slaves, who are soon brought to court for what promises to be an open-and-shut case. When complications arise, they are not over the issue of whether what the slaves did was justifiable; it is merely a question of whether the Africans are pirates or property. A sub-question: whose property are they? Spielberg has displayed a certain rose-colored view of America from time to time, and his moderate Hollywood liberalism has allowed him to play both sides of the fence with impunity for decades. But here he at last fully confronts that which he only gave a glancing blow 12 years earlier: the nation's history of slavery and racism.

I felt that The Color Purple's chief shortcoming was in its over-reliance of cheap humor that never meshed with the moments of sincerity and pain. Yet I never felt the heaping load of comedy injected into Amistad detracted from the film. Here, Spielberg and writer David Franzoni base the humor in situational comedy instead of the farce of The Color Purple. Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), the ambulance(-cart)-chasing lawyer who agrees to defend the Africans for a pair of abolitionist journalists (Morgan Freeman and Stellan Skarsgård), tries to communicate with the slaves, but the language barrier leads to minutes worth of mishaps and confusion. Even when a basic form of primitive gestures sort out a handful of problems between him and Cinqué, the two still make for a fine double act. Once a translator (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Royal Navy officer who joined the fleet after being freed by Britain's anti-slavery forces, enters and tells Cinqué's story, however, the laughs die in the throat.

In fairness, Amistad does have one too many Stanley Kramer-esque lapses of moralizing for its own good. The obvious arc of Baldwin from a brilliant-but-detached lawyer into a crusader for human rights is all too predictable, and the simplification of white characters into good and true liberals and frothing bigots who for some reason gather by the hundreds to jeer blacks for killing people from another country is tedious. Martin Van Buren gets thrown under the bus as a racist and conniver, leaving out the much more complex (and relevant) moral confusion of those politicians who did not support slavery but felt it necessary to keep the peace and avoid war. Amistad glosses over this hairy situation by making Van Buren as loathsome as possible and never giving the threat of war the gravity it deserves, especially in hindsight of the horrific costs of the Civil War.

But there are also flecks of some of Spielberg's most intelligent and thoughtful filmmaking. If he simplifies the bigoted antagonists, he at least explores the gray within the abolitionist cause: Tappan (Skarsgård), who came to anti-slavery through religion, sees value in martyrdom and would be willing to sacrifice the lives of the Africans if it meant stunning the public into action. He balks at Baldwin's strategy -- to render the matter of property null and void by proving the slaves came from Africa and therefore could not be taken as slaves following the criminalization of importing foreign slaves -- because it lacks a moral statement. He compares Baldwin's idea to Christ calling someone to get him off on a technicality, to which Baldwin replies, "But Christ lost."


Spielberg frames the racism in horrendously blunt terms, to the point that a few words of dismissal in the courtroom shock and disgust almost as much as flashbacks of murders, torture and rapes at the hands of Portuguese and Spanish sailors. Through the translator, Cinqué tells his story and of the atrocities he witnessed to Baldwin, and when the camera returns from his reverie he's in the courtroom relating this to the prosecution, U.S. Attorney William S. Holabird (Pete Postlethwaite), who instantly calls Cinqué's story a fabrication. He never once views Cinqué and the others as anything but wayward property, even when the African leader moves everyone else with his pidgin chant "Give us us free!" But really, no one in the court truly takes Cinqué's story seriously until a representative of the Royal Navy's anti-slavery troops, a white man, corroborates the slave's story. The film stresses this irony, laying percussive African music and mournful Western vocalization over Cinqué's flashbacks but reserving the somber, stunned chords for the mere words the naval officer says. And isn't it funny that those white people so disgusted by the very idea of blacks wear nothing but ink-black cloaks and clothes?

Amistad represents an autocritique of the traits Spielberg displayed in Schindler's List, even if, as I've argued, the seemingly problematic issues of that movie smooth out remarkably well on closer study. Schindler's List moved methodically through its horrors, to the point that one would be tempted to cheer if it ended Inlgourious Basterds style with Schinder's Jews machine-gunning Hitler and his companions. Here, he opens with an act of horror that later proves to be scarcely inadequate a show of rage. Yes, the audience will likely end up supporting the slaughter of Spaniards, but by putting so much distance between the outcome and the motivation, Spielberg takes all the "enjoyment" (for want of a better word) out of it and makes it something you think about it retrospect. And when it reaches what seems to be its triumphant climax, Spielberg reveals we've got another hour to go, enough time to let it sink in that, even if these slaves emerge triumphant and go home free men, that will barely put a dent on the slave trade (the illegality of which is ignored by everyone until a court is forced to deal with the issue), and their victory won't bring back the scores who died on their very ship from starvation and murder.

But the most surprising aspect of the film is Spielberg's harsh take on American politics and the notion of the American/Western ideal. John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), former president and defeated old man, putters about the film for the first two thirds until Baldwin prevails upon him successfully to help the Africans when Van Buren kicks the case to the Supreme Court despite the issue seemingly being resolved. Adams worries about standing in the shadow of his father, a worry confirmed by the dismissive views of other politicians. Yet it eventually becomes clear to the man that the only way to build his own legacy separate from that of his father is to help the document John Adams helped write achieve its full potential instead of being held back by the same sort of reactionary fools who hobbled it in the first place.

Hopkins wisely chooses to play Quincy less as a crotchety old man embittered by his perceived failure than as a resigned idealist. His climactic speech is powerful, all the more so for incorporating Cinqué's own words as a sign of respect and equality, but Hopkins adds labored breaths and grunts under even the most solemn proclamation to ground the moment. When he finishes, no one applauds. They're too busy truly thinking about what was just said.

Its length may be unjustified, it oversimplifies history and some moments fall flat -- the parallels of Cinqué summoning the spirits of his ancestors and Quincy dealing with his own progenitor have too much of a "we're not so different after all!" feel, and the brief clip of Civil War action in the closing montage is embarrassing -- but Amistad deserves more credit than I was willing to give it going into the film. It gets one last parting shot in the final text scroll, noting that Cinqué returned to find his wife and child gone, themselves likely sold in slavery, a reminder that the significant victory he and the others enjoyed only made a small blip on the radar. But it was right, and that is the point Amistad makes even as it acknowledges the darkness of the full scope.