Editor Reviews:

Description:
From the makers of Ray, AMAZING GRACE tells the inspiring story of William Wilberforce and his passion and perseverance to pass a law ending the slave trade in the late 18th century. Several friends, including Wilberforce's minister, a reformed slave ship captain who penned the beloved hymn Amazing Grace, urge him to see the cause through.

Amazon.com:
In this inspirational costume drama, Michael Apted (49 Up) recounts a period in British history sure to be unfamiliar to most Americans. In fact, his eye-opening biography of 18th century abolitionist William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) is likely to come as a revelation to many Britons, as well. After all, despite the presence of his wife, Barbara (Romola Garai), this isn't a particularly "sexy" story, but it is a powerful one. The title comes from John Newton's hymn "Amazing Grace" ("I once was lost but now am found"). Newton (Albert Finney) was a former slaveholder, who became a clergyman and spent his days repenting. While America had John Brown, England had Wilberforce, and Newton is one of many who helped the MP to abolish slavery in the UK. The story begins towards the end of Wilberforce's mission when he's sick with colitis and addicted to laudanum. Apted continues to alternate between 1797 and 1789, when Wilberforce was fitter and more idealistic, and ends in 1807 as his efforts come to fruition. Apted and writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) do right by their hero. Unlike Amistad, however, slaves are largely off-screen, with the exception of author Equiano (Senegalese vocalist Youssou N'Dour). Amazing Grace reserves its focus for the politicians who risked their reps for the greater good, like Wilberforce and Prime Minister Pitt (an excellent Benedict Cumberbatch), and those more concerned with the income slavery provided their constituents, like Lord Tarleton (Ciarán Hinds) and the Duke of Clarence (Toby Jones). --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Rating : - Saint Wilberforce's crusade
This movie romantically dramatizes the Parliamentary efforts of bleeding-heart nabob William Wilberforce to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It is well made liberal hagiography with good production value and some well known actors, but the Manichean simplicity of such agitprop is becoming very tiresome to me as I get older. The slave holders are all evil and the abolitionists are all saints (that's literally what they were known as, which demonstrates the lunatic boundlessness of liberal arrogance). We are even shown Wilberforce taking on the role of "alter Christus" as he undergoes another Passion through his physical ailments and the stress of his abolitionist crusade. There's just no gray areas in this movie, no deeper questions about an issue that still haunts us to this day.

Even if one holds slavery to be a human rights injustice, it's pretty hard for someone to turn that into a sinful offense against the Christian God, as the abolitionists claimed, considering that the Lord Jesus Himself never saw fit to address the issue while He was on earth and His own Scriptures condone the institution in the clearest terms, even going so far as to enjoin slaves to obey their masters. Why then do we still accept the demonization of slave owners that abolitionists engaged in? In the 1750 years or so between the ministry of Christ and the birth of the abolitionist movement, should we not ask why so minuscule a number of Christians, who read the same Bible and worshipped the same God as Wilberforce and his "saints", come to the same conclusions about slavery as they did? Slavery, after all, was an ancient and venerable tradition in every part of the world, especially Africa, whose role in the Atlantic slave trade goes unacknowledged in this movie. Without the help of the Africans themselves, Wilberforce would have had to find another issue to hang his hat on. Instead, this film leads the ignorant to heed the fictional tale of an African "prince" who was captured by marauding White men. It's a horrible thought, but is it perhaps nature's law that the strong and advanced will ever rule the weak and primitive, that a part of humanity is born with saddles on their back, ready to be ridden by those born booted and spurred? Will slavery be seen again in history, once the relatively brief and artificial interlude of Anglo-American liberalism is overcome by the inexorable forces of nature and its own degenerative qualities? What does it portend when recent news reports quote several Africans, disgusted by the universal failure of their liberated continent, as openly expressing a desire for the return of European colonialism?

While Wilberforce had a legitimately charitable heart and may not have been as bad as many of his compatriots, who bewailed the fate of the African slaves, while scorning the cries of five-year-old White children who went to their early graves working 16 hours a day in mines and factories, his sympathies often did not extend to his own people's horrific conditions. He opposed the right of workers to organize for better conditions and pay, and was described by one notable Englishman as someone who "who preaches vital Christianity to untutored savages, and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states". Another activist told Wilberforce that "Never have you done one single act, in favour of the labourers of this country." Where is the movie about the White serfs of the British Empire, who often lived in worse conditions than slaves? Why are we not incessantly reminded about the White blood that fueled the Industrial Revolution?

Another uncomfortable question this movie raises is why the Northern United States had to resort to bloody civil war to free the slaves, when Great Britain achieved the same goal legally and peacefully with financial compensation for slave owners. Slavery would have withered and died within a few decades had there not been a Civil War. Without favoring slavery, perhaps our northern abolitionists should be cursed as Jacobin fanatics who sacrificed 600,000 Americans on the altar of their revolutionary mania.

Another unexamined issue in this movie is the fate of the liberated. In order to prove the equality of Africans, Wilberforce and his people set up the free colony of Sierra Leone, which was populated by starry-eyed Whites and freed blacks, and liberally funded by wealthy friends. Wikipedia says "The dream was of an ideal society in which races would mix on equal terms; the reality was fraught with tension, crop failures, disease, death, war and defections to the slave trade." Today, Sierra Leone "is the lowest ranked country on the Human Development Index and seventh lowest on the Human Poverty Index, suffering from endemic corruption, suppression of the press and the HIV/AIDS pandemic." (also from wikipedia). The history of every single other black society on earth reflects the same attributes. This movie makes it seem like the Africans' troubles were over once some White men passed a bill in London. Wilberforce's abolition bill was indeed significant, but by no means got to the root of the problem, and in most ways it seems like African quality of life has only declined since the 19th century.

I'm not defending slavery and I do think Wilberforce accomplished a good thing with the abolition of slavery. I just think the issue isn't as cut and dried as Hollywood History for Dummies would lead us to believe.