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.
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