Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace. Good movie. I love the song. It almost doesn’t matter who sings it. Even me, although people have left the room when I try. I especially love the line about “who saved a wretch like me.” John Newton must have felt like a wretch after being a slaveship owner and then writing this hymn. Which is my way of letting any certain liberal clergy who change “wretch” to “soul” (so people don’t have to lose self-esteem over feeling wretchedness) that, if you sing at my funeral, DO NOT change the words.

Amazing Grace is a beautiful movie about Wilbur Wilberforce, the eponymic ancestor of Bill Williams and John Johnson. Funny, though, I thought it was going to be about the song. It’s almost like reading the book and being disappointed in the movie. But a more appropriate title would have been too long, something like The Once Azygous Recusant Who Mistook His Uxorial Mate for a Modiste but Wound Up Having a Serotinus Experience.

If you understood that then thank Cindy and her Free Rice Internet game. Of course in the website game you get multiple choices so here’s a matching game:

Azygous noncomformist

Uxorial late-blooming

Serotinus hatmaker

Recusant single

Modiste wifely

Seriously, though, this was not a movie in which I could be found in an oscitant state. My prosencephalon was directed towards the screen at all times. Not bad for a PG movie. Which may have been the problem with why the movie did not do well in this country. All-English movies are hard enough for young, American men to sit through (not as bad as German comedies), but a little more violence and more than one heaving bosom might have made it more marketable. The movie was supposed to be more about Wilberforce than about slavery and slave ships didn’t carry slaves to England, anyway, but still it could have used a little less countryside if for nothing else than to get more younger people to see it. Which is my main point, not that I need to see blood or see more than one heaving bosom.

It deserves to be seen. I really don’t know what makes a great movie, but I do know what moves me. While though there are many controversies about Wilberforce’s role in abolishing slavery and about the underlying motive of the abolitionists, he still had a significant impact. The movie does mention that the West Indian slave uprisings were partly successful because the slaves thought there was support in England which makes an interesting historical note to present-day protests in our country. Some of the controversies seem to be very similar to the one between Booker Washington and W.E.B. DuBois about which direction the campaign for racial equality should move. Slow and gradual or more radical.

The movie also has a fascinating take on fair trade issues as well as a scene of a poster in a shop window stating that it sold only sugar from free men. It gives our present day effort to buy fair trade products a nice historical perspective. The woman he ends up marrying (a lot quicker in real life than the movie implies) lets him know that she stopped using sugar for her tea long ago. Remember eating California table grapes in the ‘60’s? I hope not.

The reviews said it was historically accurate with only a few errors: the tune Wilberforce uses to sing Amazing Grace wasn’t used until 50 years later and the breed of dog they used in the movie hadn’t come to England yet.

There’s a scene at the dinner table which I loved. Wilberforce has invited a group of abolitionists to his house. One says to him that he understands that Wilberforce is trying to decide between being a man of God or being someone who can change the world. A woman to his left turns to him and says, “We would like to suggest that you can do both.”

Another part of the movie that interested me was the issue of over-crowding of the slave ships which led to many deaths of slaves at sea. There’s a mark on the sides of all American merchant ships called the Plimsoll Mark. It’s the safe load line that indicates what level the ship can carry a load. Samuel Plimsoll started his campaign from the House of Commons just a few decades after Wilberforce started his in the same place. Reaction to Plimsoll by shipowners may have been more violent than the reaction to Wiberforce by sugar plantation owners. There was an effort a few years ago to repeal or weaken the Plimsoll Mark. It was unsuccessful at the time. The ship owners will probably try to bring it back. A movie about Plimsoll and his campaign to save the lives of merchant seaman would be a welcome event. Maybe Michael Apted would be interested. It wouldn’t be hard to make it PG-13

The Unrepentant Marxist website has a very different perspective on the movie and one well worth reading. Especially for his discovery of who bankrolled the movie.

Here’s his website address as well as a poem he includes.

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/amazing-grace

Sonnet, To Thomas Clarkson,
On the final passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, March, 1807.

Clarkson! it was an obstinate Hill to climb:
How toilsome, nay how dire it was, by Thee
Is known,—by none, perhaps, so feelingly;
But Thou, who, starting in thy fervent prime,
Didst first lead forth this pilgrimage sublime,
Hast heard the constant Voice its charge repeat,
Which, out of thy young heart’s oracular seat,
First roused thee.—O true yoke-fellow of Time
With unabating effort, see, the palm
Is won, and by all Nations shall be worn!
The bloody Writing is for ever torn,
And Thou henceforth wilt have a good Man’s calm,
A great Man’s happiness; thy zeal shall find
Repose at length, firm Friend of human kind!

William Wordsworth

Thomas Clarkson is the long-haired abolitionist in the movie who recruits Wilberforce for the cause.

I had never heard of the actor or any of the cast except for Albert Finney. But then I never saw Pride and Prejudice and slept through the Fantastic Four at the drive-in when I took Peter and Alan last summer. Finney is John Newton and has a great line in the movie about only being a monk on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Drive-ins are great fun. Unless it’s the middle of summer and the first show isn’t until almost 10 which means the second show isn’t over until 2 and if the third show is the one you really wanted to see then it’s 5 a.m. before you get home. The boys and I go alone. Linda has better sense.

Has anyone seen the Pete Seeger movie? I didn’t get to it in time when it breezed through the Twin Cities and it’s not in video yet.