We finally got around to seeing the movie

Amazing Grace today. It was every bit as good as I expected it to be. They well portrayed Wilberforce's Christianity as the source of his heroism in the fight against the slave trade. I wondered, though, why there was no mention of his influence on the final abolition of slavery itself. I would like to have seen a depiction of the deathbed scene when he got the word that slavery was abolished throughout the whole British Empire.

I read a review, before I went saying, "...from a film-making perspective, the movie was a bit on the slow side, punctuated by emotionally moving scenes. These moments carried the movie along, but barely. The scenery was great and the actors were good, but I believe they could have shone more if they had been given better scripts."

I didn't feel that way (though, perhaps I was distracted by the antics of my three-year-old daughter), it seemed to me that the "slow" parts were necessary exposition. (From our perspective it seems necessary to prove that Wilberforce's opponents weren't actually Satan worshippers in order to keep the movie from being cartoonish. What was shown was that the men were, indeed, evil - some of them, anyway; the rest were, to use Hannah Arendt's word, banally accepting of the evil.) Considering which, it may be that Amazing Grace is too cerebral for the masses.

I thought it stuck very well to the facts as I've read them since I first heard about Wilberforce a month ago. It's not just a maudlin tale, as you might gather from the trailers, yet the story itself may be the most dramatic... I can't call it an event, can I? It took place over 25 years. ... It may have been the most dramatic parliamentary battle in history.

Perhaps it should have jerked more tears than it did. The death-bed scene 27 years later would have done it.