Usually it is not worth contradicting reviewers, let alone thumbnail previews. But so many comments on Michael Apted’s film about William Wilberforce — Amazing Grace — betray whiningly dishonest right-on attitudes and must be challenged.

Apart from reviewers with the attention span of a goldfish (who call it “dull” because there are no car chases) there are two main complaints. They regret the lack of horror-film scenes of flogged and branding, and claim it focuses only on Wilberforce. Wrong: the film shows a whole group of campaigners, from John Newton, the former slave-ship captain, to Equiano, the former slave. It depicts allies like Thomas Clarkson, James Stephen and Pitt himself; and acknowledges the Quaker letter-writing campaign, the vast petition and the slave revolt on Haiti.

It does not show horrors, certainly; hence the ridiculous accusation in The New York Times, parroted by a BBC interviewer, that Apted “prettifies” the trade. Hence also the Guardian whinge that this is a “white man’s movie” and our own reviewer’s dismissive “genteel”. But for a generation accustomed to explicit screen violence and plastic fake body parts, there is actually more horror in learning about slavery the way the 18th-century campaigners did.

Like Amnesty researchers in periwigs they pore over sworn written evidence of atrocity and rape. Their fight was actually more noble because they were working from evidence and principle, not sentiment. They accepted — like Fairtrade campaigners — that distant cruelty is as unbearable as cruelty in your back yard, and that economics are no excuse.

BACKGROUND

• Amazing Grace

• Amazing Grace - smaller is better

• Abolition man

• Amazingly graceless remarks by dull critics

• Film row on ‘prettifying’ of slave trade

Keeping it real

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Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Those who complain that there is no dramatised slave-beating belong to the same shallow cast of mind as modern politicians, who think that being photographed with orphans of war and then flying home is a substitute for working out how to avoid the damn war in the first place.

The focus is on the British campaign for good reasons: this is a political film. It is about vigorous parliamentarians in a vigorous Parliament, sacrificing health and peace to fight a ten-year battle for human rights. It is about principled people arguing against pragmatic fat-cats who made up excuses ranging from the “God-given” trade wind direction to the need for Newfoundland fishermen to have someone to sell fish-heads to, for feeding slaves. It is about a struggle which, thanks to Stephen, was won at least in part by parliamentary subterfuge: a Trojan-horse Bill that wrecked the profits of the trade. It delivers a shaming message to our own overwhipped and underprincipled lobby-fodder MPs.

Those who would prefer a soupy, sadistic Spielberg epic are welcome to it. Grown-ups will honour Wilberforce, his peers both black and white, and the director who gives them back to us.

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