"Amazing Grace"

"Amazing Grace." Directed by Michael Apted, Starring Ioann Gruffud, Albert Finney, and Rufus Sewell.

At the end of the 18th century, about three-quarters of the earth’s people were in bondage in slavery, serfdom, or other forms of forced servitude. Sometimes as many as a hundred European and American ships at a time crossed the seas from West Africa to Europe and the Americas, their stifling holds crammed with Africans lying spoon fashion in their own waste. The sick, dying, and the dead were cast overboard, along with ailing or dead sailors. In the late 1700s, some 18 million people were held as slaves, the majority from the African continent.
Assisted by rival West African tribal leaders, whole villages were captured by Arab, British, French, and American slavers working for owners of sugar, rubber, tobacco, and cotton plantations in the British Indies, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire. Over a half-century before Abraham Lincoln promulgated his Emancipation Proclamation, Britain had passed a
bill abolishing the slave trade (1807), and later (in 1833) abolished slavery outright in its empire.

Last month on March 24, 2007, at Ghana’s Elmina Castle, Ghanans and other West Africans commemorated the 200th anniversary of the end of the British slave trade. It was from this stone castle that their people were held and processed before being herded on to slave ships.
The film, "Amazing Grace," takes its title from the song written by a former slave-ship owner, John Newton (played by Albert Finney in the film). In transporting slaves, Newton became conscious of the horrors he was perpetrating on his fellow men. He turned to God for
forgiveness, became a priest, and wrote the song "Amazing Grace," which is still performed worldwide.

"Amazing Grace" begins in 1797. It is a sanitized version of the struggles of William Wilberforce (played by Ioann Gruffudd), a member of the British Parliament, to end slavery in the British colonies. Rather than unroll events chronologically, director Apted breaks up the film into flashbacks and flash-forwards. He filmed scenes to depict Wilberforce’s charity: In one, shot like a re-creation of a boisterous Last Supper, poor families crowd around his dining table, scarfing down food, as his servants carry laden trays to-and-fro. Not only people but also animals roamed freely about his house and grounds.

Wilberforce, an extremely wealthy Briton and a dreamer, is torn between Evangelical religion and politics. He collaborates with the abolitionist organizer Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell); Parliament member William Pitt (Benedict Cumberbatch); former slave and author, Olaudah Equiano (Youssov N’Dour), and others to convince Parliament to approve a ban on the slave trade. At a dinner party, Clarkson pushes aside dishes, and dumps cast-iron shackles and chains on the table to illustrate the horrors of slavery. Clarkson, who had traveled widely in the Indies and Africa, tells of slaves being burned in the boiling rooms of sugar plantations, and of young children falling into the vats and either being severely burned or dying.
Clarkson is often accompanied by Equiano who had managed to buy his freedom. Equiano had traveled extensively throughout the colonies, and written a book of his and other slaves’ experiences. There is a scene of him at a market fair signing his books, which sold in the thousands. The film pays little attention to the grassroots committees against slavery that grew throughout Britain in this period. Public sentiment was aroused (in part by Equiano’s book) toward a growing awareness of and empathy for the hellish world of the slave. But despite public opinion, whenever Wilberforce speaks up in the House of Commons against slavery, he
is summarily shouted down. Many parliamentarians have direct economic ties to the slave trade.

Toward the end of the film, Wilberforce carries a rolled-up, fat petition into Parliament. It bears the signatures of over 300,000 citizens. He unrolls it on the floor as proof that the people back the abolitionist movement. "The people?" chortles one member with a shrug.
After war is declared against Napoleon’s France, the British government passes a series of "anti-sedition" laws, which effectively clamp down on political organizing and throw the abolitionist movement into decline. At one point, Wilberforce gives up completely, preferring to enjoy his estate and lie around contemplating nature. Clarkson, too, has gone off to a village in the hills; he has married and is raising a family. Yet the movement soon recovers: we see women talking about boycotting sugar from their tables, and drinking their tea without it, as a show of support for abolition. Wilberforce takes up the cause again when a barrister colleague comes to him with a scheme to approach the slave issue by working to change a law concerning flags flown on ships that are engaged in trans-Atlantic trade. The new law, which is duly passed by Parliament, mandates that French ships must henceforth fly their national flag rather than masquerading under the neutral American flag—thus opening the French slavers to attacks and confiscation by the British Navy. While depicting this episode, the film ignores an opportunity to look closely into the real reasons why William Pitt and some of the more astute ruling-class Parliament members were willing to back a measure against the slave trade; they saw it as a method to cast a blow against their French rivals.

According to C.L.R. James in "The Black Jacobins," the British in this period had little need to augment the slave-labor force in their colonial possessions, and so could do without the slave trade, while the French West Indies were still dependent on it. Finally, in 1807, the abolitionist movement and its allies were able to mount enough pressure to sway a majority in Parliament into outlawing the slave trade. Wilberforce, in the film, receives a standing ovation in Parliament. Even his former adversaries feel compelled to rise to their feet. Still, records show that slavery persisted in the sugar plantations of Jamaica for another 30 years. They also reveal that Wilberforce throughout that period was mainly concerned with the comportment of
Africans, feeling it important that they renounce their native ways and be converted to Christianity. His fundamentalist beliefs would not allow him to see the slaves as little more than ignorant children and sinners. As a wealthy landowner, he displayed undeserved kindness to plantation owners who continued to brutalize the slaves, stating, "we should treat with candour and tenderness the characters of the West India proprietors." To him, the worst aspect of slavery was not that it was brutal and dehumanizing, but that it embodied "the almost universal destitution of religious and moral instruction among the slaves."

Wilberforce’s writings on this topic belie the film’s sympathetic portrait of him as a staunch abolitionist who saw slaves, and Black people, as his equals. In this, the film follows the lead of Wilberforce’s major biographers following his death—who eulogized him as the foremost leader of the abolitionist movement in Britain while downplaying the role of Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and many other anti-slavery organizers who were lower-born and often more radical than Wilberforce. Regardless, "Amazing Grace" is the rare film that deals with a groundbreaking historical moment, tantamount to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps a filmmaker will come along who will look more deeply into the lives of Clarkson, Equiano and the many other men and women who worked on the grassroots level against slavery—and thus create a more compelling film.

Michael Schreiber, editor of Socialist Action News contributed to this review. A slightly altered review of the film appears in that publication’s April issue.