Amazing Grace

Now before our readers accuse us of being grumpy, which we prefer to call tasteful discrimination, we should say that Amazing Grace is pretty good. It does its job, which is to sneak its moral in while being somewhat pleasing to watch. We suspect a number of our readers will feel roused by the ending. That ending features bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace,” the only tune that bagpipes ever seem to play these days, but in this case it seems relevant. Not only is “Amazing Grace” the movie’s title, but the author of the lyrics, John Newton, is a central character.

The story is essentially about William Wilberforce’s efforts to get the slave trade abolished in the British Empire. This is sometimes difficult to understand, though, because the movie mixes moral issues and political goals into the ambitions of six or seven different characters. We weren’t sure which reformer cared about which issue: was the slave trade their beef or were they gunning for the abolition of slavery? The movie even seems to hint that slavery was legal in England, which it was not. Eventually everything gets sorted out and we end up with Wilberforce, after years of toil and doubt, getting Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807. Good for him, we say, since manstealing is a heinous crime under Biblical law. Of course, slavery wasn’t abolished in the British colonies until twenty-six years later, in 1833, but tacking that onto the end of the movie would’ve delayed us from being roused by bagpipes.

Let’s now use Amazing Grace as an example of a general problem we constantly face. The movie casts Wilberforce as a tall, dashing gentleman. His wife, too, is a model of beauty; even in the wee hours of the morning her crisp, red hair and makeup are perfectly in place. They’re obviously the most beautiful couple in England, which adds to our acceptance of Wilberforce as a moral leader and reformer.

This is radically different from historical reality. Imagine if Wilberforce was cast as he really was: as a crippled, nearly blind, short man. (Wilberforce’s spine was curved, and so he was only 5’3″.) Imagine further that the actress that plays his wife is average-looking, which is probably historically accurate. We would then have an unwatchable movie, which doesn’t conform to the ridiculous standards of beauty that all movies conform to. Those standards in practice mean accepting traditional ways of “improving” looks — you know, like having one’s face surgically altered over and over again. Now we don’t have a serious problem with seeing extra-beautiful people every now and then on the big screen; it’s probably an inevitability in a highly competitive visual medium. Still, what if we saw Wilberforce as an ugly cripple, getting his reforms passed in spite of his obstacles and handicaps?

Perhaps the ending would’ve been even more rousing than it was. “Gee, he had those problems but did that?” we might exclaim. “He really was blessed with amazing grace.”

Entertainment: 6
Intelligence: 4
Morality: 9