Amazing Grace gets thumbs up review in New Yorker
Written by Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things”) and directed by the veteran Michael Apted, the movie is upbeat in tone, conventional in form, and often reminiscent of earlier inspirational pictures about heroes who overcome defeat and go on fighting against impossible odds. Yet, as square as this movie is, it has been made with eloquence and jaunty high spirits, and it tells a good story that is virtually unknown here.
If Americans recognize the name Wilberforce at all, they are probably thinking of Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop who was on the wrong side of the greatest intellectual issue of the nineteenth century. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, taking on Darwin’s defender Thomas Henry Huxley in 1860, the year after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” was opposed to the treading of flawed science on God’s glory or on human dignity. The Bishop’s father, William, was also a man who drew on religious definitions of dignity. If this film has it right, the father was one of the most brilliant and persuasive men of his time—and a fighter who, among other things, triumphed over the worst stomach ache in movie history. Wilberforce had colitis, and, as played by the excellent Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, he is forever clutching his midsection and grimacing, or falling to the floor in agony, only to rise to his feet and bash the M.P.s allied with the plantation owners and slave traders one more time. Wilberforce may have thought that God was punishing him for his failure to end the slave trade: his shame is right there in his gut. In the end, intestinal fortitude wins out. The act banning the slave trade was passed two hundred years ago this month.
Read entire article at David Denby in the New Yorker
If Americans recognize the name Wilberforce at all, they are probably thinking of Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop who was on the wrong side of the greatest intellectual issue of the nineteenth century. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, taking on Darwin’s defender Thomas Henry Huxley in 1860, the year after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” was opposed to the treading of flawed science on God’s glory or on human dignity. The Bishop’s father, William, was also a man who drew on religious definitions of dignity. If this film has it right, the father was one of the most brilliant and persuasive men of his time—and a fighter who, among other things, triumphed over the worst stomach ache in movie history. Wilberforce had colitis, and, as played by the excellent Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, he is forever clutching his midsection and grimacing, or falling to the floor in agony, only to rise to his feet and bash the M.P.s allied with the plantation owners and slave traders one more time. Wilberforce may have thought that God was punishing him for his failure to end the slave trade: his shame is right there in his gut. In the end, intestinal fortitude wins out. The act banning the slave trade was passed two hundred years ago this month.