FREE SPIRITS.(Movie review)

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"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 ...