Amazing Grace

PG, 109mins

Historical drama of a genteel variety is on offer in Amazing Grace, a celebration of the life of a great Englishman. Ioan Gruffudd plays William Wilberforce, the pioneering antislavery campaigner who dedicated his life to politics as a way of serving his religious faith.

Background

• Amazing Grace

• Amazing Grace - smaller is better

• Abolition man

• Amazingly graceless remarks by dull critics

• Film row on ‘prettifying’ of slave trade

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Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Gruffudd is part of a terrific cast. Alongside Benedict Cum-berbatch (playing William Pitt the Younger), he holds his own against a formidable older generation (Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ciaran Hinds), much as the young Wilberforce had to in his political career.

Romola Garai plays Barbara Spooner, the passionate idealist who captured Wilberforce’s heart and became his wife. She brings a welcome crisp, nononsense femininity to a film that contains, by necessity, rather a lot of scenes of stuffy politicians blustering at each other. However, I’m not convinced by the device of introducing Barbara in the first ten minutes then rewinding the story back to Wilberforce’s early days as a politician. It jars with the rather traditional costume drama tropes that pepper the film.

What Michael Apted’s film does convey articulately, though, is the physical drain on the abolitionists. By the final years of the campaign they are more ghosts than men, weighed down by the evils they have seen but have not yet been able to prevent.

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