Amazing Grace

Sometimes a movie with a great script and great performances can be an exercise that a film buff appreciates without being very engaged. A recent example is "Notes on a Scandal" -- very well done but with three terribly unsympathetic characters and very little for a normal person to relate to.

"Amazing Grace" is in that category, like "Hotel Rwanda", where a great script and great performances also move you. This telling of William Wilberforce's long struggle to abolish the British slave trade is truly moving -- not least from the passion of Ioan Gruffudd (pronounced Griffith) as Wilberforce. There are many other marvelous performances -- the towering Albert Finney as hymnwriter John Newton, Michael Gambon as Charles Fox, Benedict Cumberbatch as William Pitt, even Jeremy Swift as the butler -- but this is Gruffud's movie. He is strong, weak, decisive, temporizing, passionate, discouraged, serious, winsome -- a range his earlier roles have not called for but which he carries off with great verve.

So great that such a good movie brings these names to life again for our times. And of course the story, how persistence -- real persistence over years and decades -- can win out even against the strongest of vested interests, is a timeless lesson and hopefully not lost on this generation.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Olga Grushin's debut novel works so well on so many levels that it deserves the attention it's getting. At the heart of the book -- at times lyrical, at times moving, and sometimes both -- is the challenge we all face in coming to terms with the disillusionment that accompanies growing old. Do we forgive ourselves for our compromises? Did we have any choice? Were the tradeoffs worth it?

All of these questions become much bigger in the Soviet Russia portrayed by Grushin. Entering into the world of the Soviet elite will be a new experience for most readers. Once the newness wears off, however, you see that this world is not so different from yours. The choices might seem more clearly drawn or more daunting, but really, they are much the same.

Grushin effortlessly weaves a plot between age and youth in three generations, switching points of view and even narrators so smoothly the reader scarcely notices. And it makes you see that life is a whole -- what we experience now, what our spotty memory holds on to from the past, what our hopes hold out for the future. For Grushin allow even Sukhanov, who has so much to be disillusioned about, hope for the future.