Pan African Film Festival: "Amazing Grace" directed by Michael Apted, written by Steven Knight

Standard disclaimer! I am incapable of doing this type of thing without some use of spoilers. You have been warned.

The Pan African Film Festival website can be found here. It is not dial-up friendly, and there's nothing you can do to stop that irritating song from launching every single time you click a page. Make your peace with that before you clicky.

The definition of terms can be found here.

Film Amazing Grace
Director Michael Apted
Writer Steven Knight
Stars Iaon Gruffudd, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rufus Sewell,  Youssou N'Dor, Albert Finney
Awards I didn't look because this just came out.
Genre: A room with a view and a staircase and a slave, combined with white Africa.
Country UK, Hollywood style.

Yes, that's an actual genre category around here. Sometimes the last word is 'negro' and sometimes it's 'girl' and sometimes it's 'colonial lover'. Depends on the era and place the film is set in.

There are two movies called Amazing Grace at the festival. This one is not the one from Nigeria, which I couldn't work into my schedule despite wanting to do so very much. I have a region-free though, so here's hoping that one shows up on dvd.

The first thing to say is 45 seconds into it, when I realized that for the first time a PERFECT print was up on the screen, conspiracy theories floated in my head. When I got out of the film I hunted down someone for questioning and got preliminary answers. There's a bit more questioning to do so I'm going to save that for the post-festival post when I have more information. For now, know that the substandard tech is an issue PAFF is not unaware of, and perhaps that's one of the reasons they got the guy who ran the festivals at the mightly Arclight to come over to PAFF.

Wait. Maybe the first thing that should be said is this is an excellent movie. Go see it when it comes out.

When I got the schedule, this was the second movie I knew I would move hell & high water (also known as my schedule) to see. I had been tracking this one since first hearing it was in the works, and was pleased to see it had a slot at PAFF. Main reasons eagerness was afoot...

1. It's about William William Wilberforce, the politician in the core group that designed and executed the campaign which abolished slavery within the British Empire. He, like Robert Carter in the Americas, was a fascinating and complex man.
   
2. It was directed by the guy who headed up some of my favorite movies ever. Learning that it was helmed by the Coal Miner's Daughter/Gorky Park guy slightly eased the jitters.
3. It was written by the guy who wrote Dirty Pretty Things.
4. Costume! Dama!
5. Kinda interested in the slavery thing.
6. The hottie who is the musician, the hottie from Dark City, the hottie from Horatio Hornblower. 

And yet, given all those positives, I had Worries about this film for *lots* of reasons I will not attempt to get into in great detail at the moment. Maybe elsewhere, later.

This movie generated another contender for the BGF Central Best Quote of the Festival: Your life is a thread. It breaks or it doesn't break.

Update! (2/20): Post-festival, now that I'm free to do more than get up, go to work, go to movie, write up movie, go to bed, repeat..I've gone back to listening to the radio. There are many ads for this film on various NPR programs, and I don't understand why they're promoting it as being about the song that inspired the movement. This movie is not about that at all. This movie is about the process of how slavery was abolishe din the British empire. The song, as used in this movie, is incidental. Maybe the movie marketing people thought that they were promoting the Nigerian film of the same name, which IS about the song. That one came out over in Nigeria in October. Here's a YouTube thing with the trailer of that film.

The good stuff! Actors? Fantabulous! Outfitting? Excellent! Compressing MASSIVE amounts of real time and information into 111 minutes without boring and/or confusing you? Pretty damned good. Emotional engagement? For the most part, top notch! Gruffudd in particular did an excellent job in the way he physically/emotionally conveyed someone dealing with a chronic illness. On top of that, his portrayal of a person of deep passion and zeal was quite a delight. There's a difference between Bringing Down The Thunder and Speechifying. He thundered.  Cumberbatch also did an impressive job transforming from youth to statesman, and the friendship between their two characters vibed real.  Sewell's take on Clarkston was so dead on, even though a few liberties were taken, I wished there would be another movie just on him.

One Worry I had was the scope of the base story. It involves a *lot* of people, nearly each of whom had rich histories. The base story covers decades of time. Turning it into a movie means taking an issue of public policy and creating a work that is not a documentary snoozer. What the filmmakers did was focus on one key guy, and for the most part conveyed the story as a political drama. For the most part, this worked. Forever ago when I had cable, I used to like to watch the British Parliament on C-SPAN. I loved how they would yell at each other, insult each other by wielding mighty forensic skill. There's a lot of Parliament yelling in this film, they're just all in costumes and powdered wigs.

I was also very much concerned about how they would portray Equiano, and how much they would use slaves as Concept while pushing slaves as People into the background. While there is some Concept going on, the filmmakers do make a deliberate effort to remind viewers that Slavery is not an abstract. There's a dream sequence that turns the sugar works in the islands into a Dante hell, and we have Equiano as a substantive supporting character. With Equiano they even touch on the controversy surrounding his origins (in the movie that is, not on the movie website which is more liberal with facts), and there's a brief book tour segment that was cute. (They didn't get into how he complained about the attacks against his origin was hurting his book sales, though. But then again, this wasn't a movie about Equiano. I wanted more Equiano, but this story wasn't about him specifically.)

The historians tell us that you could smell an active (as in fully loaded) slave ship from two miles away. Narratives they've culled from surviving records say that the very wood of ships working the passage were so stained with the blood, bile and excrement of the cargo that the sailors could never manage to scrub or lime it away. So even when empty and just sitting there, a slave ship reeked of death.  There's a sequence in Amazing Grace portraying this, and another where Equiano takes Wilberforce on a tour of a docked slave ship, describing each specific type of horror that took place in certain areas of the ship.  I thought they worked, but *maybe* there's a little bit too much 'protective cover' used for both of these items. I just got out of the theater and am going to think about this aspect more, but I hope this opens wide so other people can see it and share thoughts on this element.

The scene where the core abolitionists gang up on Wilberfore to recruit him is GREAT. Part of why that's so good is how the future prime minister works it.

The plot! William Wilberforce was a member of Parliament who pretty much dedicated his entire life trying to get their legislative body to abolish slavery within the empire. They indicate the passage of time in the movie, but they don't directly say that it took this he and the rest of the team more than 20 years to accomplish this task. He was part of  a strike team working simultaneously at the levels of public policy, legislature and  religion to break through the Indifference Wall of the masses and motivate them to action. (Just as I believe Nightmare Before Christmas is a training manual for middle-managers, the campaign these men pulled off should be used as a guide for anyone working in the realm of modern social justice.) They had to convince people that removing the fundamental element of the economic strength of their entire nation was the right thing to do. They had to recover from failure over and again. They had to keep speaking when world events made some consider their actions treasonous.

Nearly every key historical player who should show up in this movie does, though if you don't come to this movie with a working knowledge of who is who and why they matter, you might not pick up on the import of some of the secondary characters. That's okay, though. If the filmmakers got too tripped up in every Historical Personage detail, this thing would be hours long, scattered and boring.

The plot holes! Bagpipes are what Hell will sound like, okay? Even though it was beautiful in the way it started small, got bigger and ended with the look up at Westminster Abbey and then unto heaven, I had to put my fingers in my ears. Which barely helped.

I could have done without the romance subplot, but understand that her role was in part the gateway that allows him to tell us the story.

I did not like at all how the character of John Newton was Deified. This has nothing to do with the actor, Albert Finney, who was as good as ever.  How they run him in the movie works in the movie. I have problems with the continued myths accepted as fact surrounding Newton. While this movie did not necessarily promote those *specific* myths, its portrayal of him as a monk-like figure humbling himself in a church supported the *general* myth, and that irritated me. While they do have Finney deliver a line about being a monk on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (paraphrasing, here), for me it was't enough.

Frankly, the movie would have been fine without this version of Newton in it. The hymn is really not that crucial to the film. It is, however, the audience hook. I acknowledge the effectiveness of this compromise between drama and fact when it comes to this character. I just don't like it.

Music! They had an orchestra, and by GOD they were going to use it. I dunno. Say you have one of the most acclaimed international musicians on the planet actually *in* your movie. Say he won a Grammy, was nominated for a Grammy or two at other times, and has won tons of other awards from other places. And technically your movie does deal with Africa because, you know, that's where the slaves came from and everything. At some point - maybe when you're in the shower, maybe when you're zoning out when standing in line at Starbucks - wouldn't the thought hit to turn the score over to that composer guy who's IN your movie? Let him bring a bit of Africa vibe to the sound of this film that is so ghosted by Africans? You know, if for no other reason than so that some loudmout woman won't go on the internet(s) and bitch about the pedestrian, overarching, you-can-swap-this-out-with-nearly-any-other-costume-drama-soundrack-and-never even-notice approach you decided to go with?

Then again, going back to that bagpipe thing, this is a story from the pov of the British. The Fisk University Singers were not up and touring England at this time ('cause, you know, it didn't exist), several hundreds of years would pass before Afro-Carib music would break wide on the Empire. Their version of Amazing Grace must fit the time period of this movie, and what they went can be said to be appropriate.

I'm waffling? Maybe so.

Application of the first rule: Medium to high. This depends on your tolerance for costume dramas. Around here, we LOVE costume dramas.

Application of the Sledgehammer Rule: Low. Truly!

Reaction of 13-year-old boy who is my inner essence: He drifted in and out.

Application of Julia Phillips rule: Gotta see this one on the big screen.

Die Whitey index: I know it sounds weird, but low. That's because of its genre, and because of the things they chose not to ignore.

Hotness index Low. I know! WTF! All those hotties! If I were less tired I'd attempt a full explainer. For now I'll cheat by saying when you see it, you'll understand.

Was Quentin there? You're kidding, right?

Random tidbit! That personable kid who's been at the festival every SINGLE night of the run passing out lobby cards to the Ghana film, A Goat's Tale, and occasionally producing a CD of the soundtrack from his pocket (available at the low price of $10)? That's not just some intern hired by the studio. That's the guy who wrote, produced and directed the movie here at the fest for his US debut. There's no studio involved. I had purchased my ticket for the screening I'll attend first day of the festival, based on the trailer I saw somewhere last month. I showed him my ticket to *prove* that I'm already in, mainly so I didn't end up with another lobby card. He was working the hallway again last night. I love hustle! Here's hoping the movie doesn't suck.

For the record, I think the "Amazing Grace Sunday" thing is marketing ASS. Smart, but still ASS.