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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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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...
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