Few stories are more inspiring than the life of William Wilberforce, the member of British Parliament who singlehandedly and tirelessly fought for years in the 18th Century to get the world’s leading superpower of the day to abolish the slave trade.



Then why was I disappointed by Amazing Grace, a film that some have compared to classics like Chariots of Fire or Shadowlands? After all, this PG film came with good credentials, being directed by Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter) based on a screenplay by Academy Award nominee Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things).

Somehow, the filmmakers have managed to take the story of an underdog fighting a moral cause against one of the world’s great evils, coupled with the story of what is perhaps history’s most-loved hymn, and turn it into a dull, didactic, and sanctimonious 1-hour and 51-minute film.

To be sure, the film does have some bright moments. We see John Newton (Albert Finney), the former slave trader who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” toiling with his demons as a monastic cleric while serving as a mentor to Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffud from Fantastic Four). “All I know is 29,000 slaves live with me in this little church. There’s still blood on my hands,” he tells Wilberforce. “I can’t help you, but you do it. … Do it, for God’s sake!”

We are carried into the close friendship between Wilberforce and William Pitt (Benedict Cumberbatch), who becomes Prime Minister at age 24 and also urges Wilberforce to take on the whole Parliament. “Do you intend to use your beautiful voice to praise the Lord or to change the world?” he asks Wilberforce.

And we see Wilberforce wrestling with his own sense of mission and purpose, as he comes to faith while already a successful parliamentarian. He eventually heeds the advice of some of the leading abolitionists: “We understand you are having problems deciding whether to do the work of God or the work of a political activist,” they tell him. “We humbly suggest you can do both.”
 
While Amazing Grace certainly will be an improvement over most Sunday-school videos, it’s disappointing that it could have been so much more. So many of the film’s decisions seem so calculated. Notice how the movie posters play up the romance between Wilberforce and Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). It was almost as if, after an initial reading of the script, a producer said, “Let’s get a Kate Winslet type to spice up this film like she did for Titanic.” There are several performances of “Amazing Grace” throughout; some even have a relationship to the plot. And expect to see several Hollywood movie clichés (Wilberforce saves a horse in the first two minutes) that you’ll see coming long before they happen.

A film about faith put into action should inspire us in the literal sense of the word “inspire”—it should breathe the spirit of the Divine into all who watch. Any filmgoer gets that sense when watching great inspirational dramas like Chariots of Fire, It’s a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Schindler’s List. Measured against these standards, what should have been powerful material turns out to be not so amazing after all.