Amazing Grace

Whether or not this is “a Sunday-school version of one of history’s great social movements,” financed by a shadowy benefactor of the Religious Right, as alleged by the New York Review of Books, it’s still a pretty good movie with its heart in the right place, leagues better than something like Amistad in showing the struggle to overturn slavery. Michael Apted is a serious and accomplished director of features and documentaries, and if you’re going to make a hero out of your period protagonist, you could hardly do better than Horatio Hornblower himself, the Welsh dreamboat Ioan Gruffudd. He plays William Wilberforce, the persistent parliamentary agitator against slavery from the 1790s right up to its final abolition in Britain at the time of his death in 1833, and he is definitely appealing in his righteousness, evangelical activist though he may be and however much his other reactionary views may have been elided. The period is well evoked, and the periwigs are well inhabited by the likes of Michael Gambon, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, and Albert Finney. Youthful BBC veteran Romola Garai is the saucy but committed love interest, and new face Benedict Cumberbatch is convincing as William Pitt, Wilberforce’s Cambridge classmate and longtime ally, who at 24 became the youngest Prime Minister ever (and namesake of Pittsfield, of interest to those of us here in the Berkshires.) Though I am not devoted to strict chronology in film, this was the third film I’d seen in a week that would have made more sense told straight through instead of in flashback and flashforward, a needless complication to an already complicated story. Though the NYRB had a number of historical quibbles, I was struck by how each point was addressed if not elaborated by the film itself. So even if Wilberforce is advanced as the hero of this story, other contributions are noted. As is the contemporary relevance of slavery as a continuing issue, and the surprising transcendence of economic self-interest. Given slavery’s contribution to the British economy, it’s almost as if contemporary Americans should find the moral fiber to ban the import of oil. It’s possible the money behind the film wanted to push the parallel between abolition and anti-abortion crusades, but the movie as it stands offers a wealth of differing implications. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-65.)