We’ve just got back from seeing Amazing Grace, the movie about William Wilberforce, the main difference from our usual trips to the cinema being that we were at a private screening accompanied by well over 200 other people from primarily St James, but with others from the other local Churches too.

The most amusing thing about going with the Church was watching everybody come in. Members of the Church of England have a reputation for always filling up a Church from the back. I joked with Beth beforehand that a bunch of Church people going to the cinema would do exactly the same, not really expecting that they would. We went in and sat down in a pair of seats on the end of the sixth row with better legroom, but seriously, until about ten minutes before the film started, there was nobody in front of us – the entire cinema filled up from the back!

Anyway, it being a private screening, there was none of the usual advertising, trailers or promotions for the cinema aside from one solitary advert for advanced booking – we just went straight into the movie.

The movie is very much a talkie political piece, concentrating on Wilberforce himself. Thanks to the need to compress twenty years worth of campaigning into a two hour film, parts of the movie are pretty compressed, and in some ways quite confusing and hard to keep up with – especially as much of the early part of the movie is told in flashback from April 1797 when he meets his wife-to-be.

Although it is definitely a talkie, there is relatively little of scenes in parliament, and the focus is primarily on the relationships between Wilberforce and William Pitt, Wilberforce and John Newton, and Wilberforce with fellow abolitionists.

One of the main thoughts I had about the movie though, was that two hours was not really enough time to tell the whole story about Wilberforce – for example he was a founding member of what is now the RSPCA, which comes up in passing when he is discussing the animals with which he shares his house. Certainly a series may well do more justice to the amount of work, and just the sheer slog of repeatedly putting the act through parliament and failing than a two hour movie could ever do. Having said that, it is still a good movie, and I certainly recommend that people go and see it if they can.

Just one point to note though, I have to admit that the very final sombre scene, with pipers playing Amazing Grace outside Westminster Abbey instantly caused this scene to pop into my head… Sorry, I’m obviously a cultural philistine… 😮