Ryan's Journal

Amazing Grace is a British Heritage Society film promoting key figures and cultural touchstones from the history of the isles, utilizing only British talent and cinematic production in line with the Heritage's goal of preserving proud English traditions.

That's probably not true (is there such thing as a British Heritage Society?). But it might as well be.

Amazing Grace tells the tale of William Wilberforce and peripherally touches on the origins of the eponymous hymn, the author of which Wilberforce counted as his counselor. This it does to a fault, and because a biopic must in essence be a reductionist re-telling of a life, the obvious and necessary shortcuts and embellishments make abundant appearances. They are the unavoidable trade offs of the director and editor.

What's missing from Grace is any sense of meaning, a latent issue rampant throughout modern populist history: showcase the man's highlight reel, but skip the analysis and implications of his impact. Wilberforce, the figurehead and central agent of a movement responsible for legislatively eradicating the slave trade within the British Empire and by extension provoking the world over to adopt a legal stance against slavery, probably has at least a bit to teach us today. We now live in a world in which every sovereignty declares slavery to be illegal, and almost every country is still complicit in its continued existence. But the film has nothing to say about that. In and of itself, the disconnect between the depiction of abstract political wrangling for the passage of a bill and the actual conditions that promote actual slavery, then and now, is enough to condemn the film as little more than a trifle. The fight against slavery has only a part to do with government subscription and participation; Wilberforce was for the actual, live, communal, humane practice of humanity - I daresay he knew his part as an MP would be necessary but insufficient on its own. He is sadly shoehorned into a standard trope of perseverance and romantic love, his essential passion trivialized and neatly castrated into a contest of political wills.

Why did the hypothetical Heritage Society bother making this movie? The release of Grace commemorated the bicentenary of the final passage of Wilberforce's abolitionist bill into law. That's all it does. Clearly, I wanted more.

Rare are the films that make me feel like I could truly do a better job with the material. I have no aspirations to be a film maker, I'm rather certain I would be terrible at it, yet I'm sure I could tell a far more thought-provoking story based on Wilberforce's life and times than what I saw. As my viewing companion noted, you are interested in finding out more about Wilberforce afterwards - and my, wouldn't it be great if somebody made a movie about him?

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