Grace promotes politics over Wilberforce's faith

In Amazing Grace, Christian politician William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) makes a point about slavery to a stubborn Parliament.

'AMAZING GRACE,' the song, is a beloved gospel classic; but once in a while, someone complains that it isn't Christian enough - at least not in that first, famous verse.

Words like 'grace' are too vague, and phrases like "I once was blind, but now I see" could refer to just about any spiritual experience - or so the argument goes.

Amazing Grace, the film, has provoked a similar debate. Evangelicals have welcomed the film with open arms - partly because it shines a light on William Wilberforce, the Christian politician who brought an end to slavery in the British Empire in the early 1800s, but also because it is made with production values much higher than those of the typical Christian movie. In short, it feels like, and is, a 'real movie.'

But some observers have noted that the film seems to marginalize the role faith played in Wilberforce's life and work. Reportedly, the film's producers - including Bristol Bay Productions, which is owned by Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz - originally wanted the film to focus on Wilberforce's faith. But director Michael Apted (49 Up, The World Is Not Enough) and screenwriter Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) said they wanted to focus on the power of positive politics, instead.

And so Amazing Grace turns William Wilberforce (Fantastic Four's Ioan Gruffudd) into a fairly simple hero for a modern secular age. The content of his faith remains essentially private: we hear about his conversion after the fact, but we never get a sense of why he converted in the first place. His friend John Newton (Albert Finney), the former slave trader who wrote the titular hymn, is likewise portrayed in terms that emphasize his personal spirituality: his life, he says, is one of "solitude."

Wilberforce does hook up eventually with the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelicals who want to abolish slavery, and the film is very effective in showing how they sought to open the eyes of their fellow Britons to the travesties of the slave trade.

However, the film gives virtually no time at all to Wilberforce's other main objective, 'the Reformation of Manners.' Other characters casually mention that Wilberforce has given up personal habits like gambling, and you get the sense that he doesn't care for comic operas, but the film never lets on that he acted against such things on a social scale. The film also avoids mentioning other deeds of his that might not be palatable to a modern liberal audience, such as the banning of trade unions.

Amazing Grace is a valuable film inasmuch as it draws our attention to a crucial part of our history. The irony is, Wilberforce set out to change the consensus of his age, and succeeded spectacularly after many years, but the film about him has been carefully designed to avoid upsetting the commonly held opinions of our own times.

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A great movie just got a little better. The Miracle Maker, the Welsh-Russian animated film that just happens to be one of the best life-of-Jesus movies ever made, has been re-issued on DVD in a 'special edition' that includes a few new bonus features.

Chief among these is the audio commentary with co-director Derek Hayes and one of the producers. They reveal some interesting things about the development of the movie, and they have some fun stories to tell about the cultural differences and problems in translation that arose between them and the Russian animators.

The disc also comes with a trivia game, a making-of documentary, and an optional subtitle track that notes which parts of the Bible different scenes come from.

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The VanCity Theatre is hosting the Vancouver premiere of Adam's Apples March 30 - April 5. The film stars Casino Royale's Mads Mikkelsen as an "insanely optimistic preacher" who takes an atheist neo-Nazi ex-convict under his wing. Billed as a "sly religious parable," it sounds like the film will have the scathing, subversive humour that is characteristic of many other Danish films. Check vifc.org for showtimes.

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Last month I mentioned that The Final Inquiry was due to be released April 6 under the Fox Faith banner. That was true at the time, but the film's release date has since been postponed. FoxFaithMovies.com now says it is merely "coming soon."

Meanwhile, Variety reports that Hyde Park Entertainment has hired a writer to whip up a script called Risen: The Story of the First Easter, which will follow the early church as far as the first Pentecost. Coincidentally, a couple of Canadians who were once associated with the Visual Bible are now developing The Sword of Peter with a German producer; this film will follow the early Church to Peter's martyrdom.

With all these would-be sequels to The Passion in the works, it's only fitting that Benedict Fitzgerald - who actually co-wrote Mel Gibson's film - recently sold MGM the distribution rights to his newest script, Myriam, Mother of the Christ.

- filmchatblog.blogspot.com

April 2007