'Amazing Grace' gives hymn place in history

William Wilberforce, an evangelical British parliamentarian, fought to end the slave trade.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
We know the hymn. Atheist or Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or Jew, you'd be hard-pressed not to have stumbled across it somewhere.
"Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see."
But even if you know the words, you probably don't know who was lost, the "wretch" who was saved, the man who wrote it. And you don't know how he, and his song, changed the world.
That hymn's unknown history, its place within the first civil-rights movement -- the abolition movement in 18th-century Britain -- is the subject of "Amazing Grace," an emotionally engaging drama from a director famed for his screen biographies and his sermons.
It's about William Wilberforce, an evangelical British parliamentarian who found his voice, and his cause, when his minister taught him this song and the minister's friends brought him their cause.
Ioan Gruffudd plays Wilberforce, whom we meet as a sickly, lonely older man, beaten down by the battle he has waged, for years, to get Britain to abolish its slave trade. Friends nurse him, and do a little matchmaking. As he recovers from a bout of colitis and is wooed by the fetching and feisty Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai), we flash back to the signal events in his life that made him dedicate himself to this cause, and feel him rally to it once again.
Unpopular cause
It wasn't a popular cause, especially when it started. Wilberforce, a Tory, was going up against shipping interests, protected by Lord Tarleton (Ciaran Hinds), the royal family (Toby Jones plays a bigoted Prince of Wales) and the vast majority in Parliament. His religious zeal for the cause first alarms his friends, but then the wily future prime minister, William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberpatch), finds a way to use it, and him.
"God sometimes does his work with a gentle drizzle, not a storm. Drip drip."
Thus, the battle is joined. Wilberforce meets more abolitionists, wins converts in Parliament (Michael Gambon plays one), introduces bills, is beaten, and tries again.
Gruffudd isn't an overpowering leading man. Others might have been better at conveying Wilberforce's anguish, his passion, his lauded singing voice (he sings the title song to the Prince of Wales, in a pub). But TV's Horatio Hornblower and the big screen's Mr. Fantastic gets across the earnestness, and he makes the flashbacks to Wilberforce's speeches on granting American independence and ending the slave trade the film's most moving moments. Wilberforce was a one-man compassion crusade, helping found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, feeding the poor, fighting one good fight after another.
Rufus Sewell, playing the abolition brigand Thomas Clarkson, gives the guy a mouthy, Quixotic demeanor even if he plays this more as a hair-carefully tossled-over-one-eye pose. Hinds, as the man Americans knew from the Revolutionary War as "The Butcher Tarleton," gives us another reason to hate the British "war hero."
Who wrote song
The scene-stealer here is the man who wrote the hymn that changed the young politician. Albert Finney is John Newton, ex-slave ship captain, the "wretch" turned preacher and hymn-writer. Here is the guilt, the heartfelt grief over the "20,000 ghosts" he transported to the Indies that the movie begs for.
"Wilbur, you have work to do. Do it, for God's sake!"
It's a natural story for director Michael Apted, who has made documentaries on American Indian activists, the student uprising in Beijing and gorilla-protector Dian Fossey in between James Bond popcorn pictures.
The movie's shortcomings are in its limited focus. This is the fight, as fought, in Britain. The slave trade itself is kept abstract, with empty (but stinking of death) slave ships and empty manacles as props for speeches. It's the way the average Briton, civilian or Parliamentarian, would have known the trade, but the movies can be expected to make it more vivid, give slavery more of a human face.
"Amazing Grace" arrives as Hollywood-slick, a polished British period-piece. It manipulates, but then again, so does the song that gives it its title. And movies, like hymns and history, should give us a good cry, every now and again.