It’s not always the case that bigger is better, particularly in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s star-studded abolitionist epic Amistad may have captured the big screen slave experience, but it could done with the cogent and persistent argument on display in Michael Apted’s smaller but similar-themed Amazing Grace. Here is a movie that tracks the UK’s original abolitionist cause through the Westminster political machine in unapologetically fine detail.

And yet, without a Spielbergian budget to back-up the production’s grand narrative aims, Amazing Grace sometimes feels slightly limited. While Amistad recreated the slaving reality in far flung locations like San Juan in Puerto Rico, Apted’s modestly budgeted movie was shot in glamorous Gloucester, and has lots of people describing slave plantations instead.

Of course, it’s not the first film to allow production logistics get in the way of a decent location shoot. A cash-strapped Roman Polanski recently produced and shot his own Oliver Twist adaptation in cheap-as-chips Prague instead of pricey London. Danish iconoclast Lars Von Trier has been recreating Middle America in both Sweden and Denmark for years, thanks to his crippling fear of flying. In an age of near limitless cheap travel it seems that traditional film productions, with their large crews, cast and equipment, remain prohibitively cumbersome beasts.

Nonetheless, the lack of recreated slaves scenes occasionally makes the issue of abolition in Amazing Grace seem like a White Man’s burden alone. Without a cast of black faces or black voices to define it, the question of slavery becomes, as it did in Amistad, a vexing moral issue for the white establishment rather than a matter of life or death for those in its grip.

Background

• Amazing Grace

• Amazing Grace - smaller is better

• Abolition man

• Amazingly graceless remarks by dull critics

• Film row on ‘prettifying’ of slave trade

Keeping it real

Michael Apted’s new film about slavery has its critics. But what irks this craftsman most is calling his landmark Seven Up series reality TV

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

“He spoke for those who had could not speak for themselves,” grumbles the trailer’s stentorian voice-over, while star Ioan Gruffud, as abolitionist hero William Wilberforce, frets pensively in the House of Commons. And yet, as history has shown us, respected UK-based black activists like Ottobah Cugoano, Robert Wedderburn, and Ignatius Sancho were all alive at the time, often published, and perfectly able to use their voices in opposition to slavery – Cugoano was notable, especially, for being the first writer in the English language to entertain the idea that black slaves had the moral duty to resist slavery.

In the end, the film opts for political intrigue and intelligent argument over epic vistas and social realities. Which is more than you usually get at your local multiplex.

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