Film Fatale

Amazing Grace
Dir. Michael Apted
2006. Ioan Gruffud, Michael Gambon, Youssou N'Dour.

Michael Apted’s stirring if conventional bio-pic of 18th-century British abolitionist William Wilberforce offers rum, funneled into anti-slavery PM William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberbatch) and sugar, in the form of the hero’s adoring wife, Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). This is polite England, so Middle Passage horrors remain veiled: slave turned memoirist Oloudah Equiano a/k/a “Gustavus” (Youssou N’Dour) is silenced until the end credits. As Wilberforce, Ioan Gruffudd (The Fantastic Four, TV's Horatio Hornblower) conveys the charisma of a 'faced-on-faith hero. Just how he outmaneuvers his enemies becomes a cynical surprise, especially in a drama financed by fundamentalist Christian tycoon Philip Anschutz of Walden Media. Don’t seek answers here as to where God is when mankind fails, on a tremendous scale, to love his fellow man. That’s for other films to deal with. Better ones, like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. (Or worse: BILLY JACK.) For now--for a portrait of a righteous man who gave his all to help others, there’s Wilberforce, exacting moral justice without going berserk.
--Justine Elias
The Boston Phoenix
Feb. 21, 2007