The British slave trade was abolished 200 years ago--and now, to commemorate that, the Bristol Bay production company is launching a campaign to raise awareness about slavery today. Anchoring that campaign is Amazing Grace, a film that centers on Wilberforce, the English abolitionist who managed to convince Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Attached to the film is the "Amazing Change Campaign," which urges lawmakers to ensure that slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world. Estimating that 27 million people are enslaved today, the campaign features a petition for people who support global abolition. So far, nearly 50,000 people have signed.
That's the good news. The bad news--if we accept the assessment of the Village Voice--is that the film is just about unwatchable. Weighed down by an excessive need to show off the research that went into it and marred by an uncritical insistence on "deifying" an all-too human Wilberforce, the film is, in the Voice's judgement, "morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake":
... the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-Skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would were Apted able to bring a little drama to the party. Just as Blood Diamond was about white men making the world safe for conflict-free earrings, Amazing Grace is the story of how England was won over to slavery-free sugar imports by William Wilberforce, a liberal member of Parliament. Only, being British, he talks--and talks, and talks--the opposition into submission. Wil- berforce, the real-life abolitionist who devoted his life to pushing anti-slave-trade legislation through a hostile Parliament terrified of waving goodbye to the British Empire, comes with grade-A hero credentials. Still, he doesn't deserve to be deified, sanctified, and so thoroughly bleached of human blemish that hardened highwaymen and exhausted horses quail before his goodness and mercy--and that's just in the first 10 minutes.
The Voice review is as sharp and funny as the film is reputedly dull and moralistic--and as such it points to an important truth: Art doesn't have to be morally heavyhanded in order to be morally serious, and people who forget that tend to produce works that are unintentional parodies of the very values they are trying to uphold.
Amazing Grace opens Friday.