“Amazing Grace,” a vibrant historical epic about the ending of the slave trade in the British Empire, offers what might be called an ideal of virile ethical activity. William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd), the son of a wealthy merchant, enters the House of Commons in 1780, when he is all of twenty-one years old; his college friend William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberbach), the son of the former Prime Minister, also twenty-one, enters the Commons the following year. An observer watching them race around a country estate together might think they are planning some prank, like filling the decanters in the Commons waiting rooms with vinegar. They are actually planning the moral reform of the Empire. In an early scene, Pitt, suppressing a grin, advises Wilberforce of his intention to become Prime Minister immediately, which he does, at the age of twenty-four, in 1783. The friends, too young to be abashed by their own presumption, take on the slave-trade interests—a good part of the upper class, which was making a fortune from it—as a kind of consecrated adventure. 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.

The opening scenes catch Wilberforce in 1797, when the cause is at a low ebb. His anti-slavery bill, introduced every year, is easily defeated, and Wilberforce is getting rained on—stinging cold downpours, of the type much favored by movie directors, douse his suffering body whenever he goes out. Hooked on laudanum (i.e., opium), the fashionable painkiller of the day, shaky and disgusted, he is saved by the attentions of Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai), a Gainsborough beauty with a luxuriant pile of red hair and a creamy bosom. Through one long night, in front of a fire, he recounts to her the history of the abolitionist movement. Having one character narrate a story to an ardent and beautiful soul mate is a tame and cozy device, but what we see is fascinating. Wilberforce, who often thought of going into the evangelical church, was recruited to the abolitionist cause in the seventeen-eighties by a group of Quakers and dissidents, including Oloudah Equiano (Youssou N’Dour), an ex-slave who wrote a widely read autobiography detailing the horrors of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, and Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell), a radical who gathered vast amounts of information about the slave trade. When Wilberforce needs a fresh layer of moral armor, he goes to see John Newton (Albert Finney), a former slave-ship captain, who, mortified by his career as a sinner, wrote the lyrics to the hymn “Amazing Grace,” in the seventeen-sixties. By the seventeen-eighties, Newton was living as a penitent and a monk in a small Anglican church in London. Albert Finney, now seventy, has become as fearsome as an ancient whale—a massive body, with a gaping mouth, bulging eyes, and a coruscating voice. It’s only a small role, but Finney takes Newton’s sense of sin beyond hamming and into anguish.

Michael Apted is perhaps best known for his work on the biographical documentary series that began with “Seven Up!” (1964) and has been followed by six septennial installments, but he has made some lovely feature films, including “Agatha” (1979) and the Loretta Lynn bio-pic, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980). As a feature-film director, he has always had a gentle touch—tactful, a little restrained. For “Amazing Grace,” he and the cinematographer Remi Adefarasin work in a slightly pale color scheme, as if England had been redrawn in pastels. The picture moves swiftly, but it’s not madly over-dynamized, as most big movies now are. Wilberforce may attack the complacency of the rich who refuse to hear about the suffering of the slaves, but Apted is candid enough to demonstrate that the privileges of wealth can be delightful: now and then, Wilberforce retreats to an estate in Yorkshire, where he lies on the grass in ecstatic communion with nature, and entertains the local poor in his fancy dining room.

One of the flourishes of the British temperament that are most enchanting to Americans is the alternation, among the brightest spirits, of seriousness and wit. The parliamentary debates, as shaped by Steven Knight, leap from noble declamation to taunting one-upmanship and back again. At such moments, the movie offers a dream of perfect articulateness—superbly trained actors delivering expertly phrased remarks with ease and force. Ioan Gruffudd has a serious brow, a wide smile, and romantically disordered locks, and, in the parliamentary scenes, he plants his feet and lets his voice ring out. Glowering, dark-eyed Ciarán Hinds is on hand as his surly opponent, Lord Tarleton, the chief defender of the slave-trading interests, and the great Michael Gambon, with his richly musical baritone, wafts his bulk through the movie as the Whig politician Charles James Fox, who becomes an influential supporter of the abolitionists. In this country, we have great actors, but not these kinds of great actors—men and women who can play historical figures and hold to formal syntax without losing their sense of play. Our founding crew of statesmen and intellectuals were no less gifted than Pitt and Wilberforce, but, despite an endless number of best-selling books about them, there isn’t a single good movie devoted to their efforts. At this point, no one can look at an American in a powdered wig without laughing. Popular culture and the democratization of taste and style have made our history irredeemable as entertainment—which is a loss, though I don’t suppose anyone will do much about it.



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