Movie Review: Amazing Grace ***

"Amazing Grace" is the story of William Wilberforce and his campaign to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire in the late 1700s and early 1800s. John Newton, former slave ship captain, author of the song, and elderly clergyman of some sort, is the source of some of Wilberforce's inspiration. The theme of youthful enthusiasm for earth-shattering reform makes a repeated appearance, as close friends Pitt the Younger and Willberforce try to persuade Parliament and spark a mass abolition movement among young English citizens. Much of the film transpires in flashback form, as a twenty-years-older Wilberforce looks back on the heady days when he should have caused a large enough stir in the people for slavery to be abolished. The key, the abolitionists find, is to raise the consciousness of the ordinary citizens by publishing diagrams of slave holds, displaying the manacles that restrain slaves and the boxes in which they cross the ocean in the holds of the ships. There is a girl who falls in love with Wilberforce, and so forth. As a movie, "Amazing Grace" takes nearly two hours' time, but it feels longer due to the inessential romance. A movie simply cannot capture all of the facets of a man's life. That is the office of books.
As a film, "Amazing Grace" has a good script and a functional cast, with Albert Finney's Newton the definite highlight. As history, I was disappointed by not surprised: it is not easy to make the slave trade appear worse than it was, but the creators manage it. I have read that slave ships experienced a mortality rate of 5-30%. The movie represents the idea that 2/3 of the slaves who left Africa died en route to the New World. Sailors doubtless dug through the masses of human remains in Kingston to call out, "I found another one breathing!" Of course, the black man who urges Wilberforce to advocate abolition mentions repeatedly, "I was a prince in my country." The myth that white men took armies to Africa to round up unsuspecting black innocents will not die, evidently. In fact, the vast majority of slaves suffered capture in a war with a rival tribe and the black victors marched them to the coast for sale to the white shippers.
One question the movie raises, perhaps without meaning to: Do we owe our National Anthem to the abolitionists? In a ploy to damage the slave trade, Wilberforce sponsors a bill to provide for the searching of ships flying the neutral American flag. Why not let the Privateers do his dirty work for him? A few impressments of American sailors and outcries from the Americans later, the War of 1812 was raging on the American Continent.