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Trailer for "Amazing Grace"

At one point in Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, the 18th-century anti-slavery agitator William Wilberforce rises in England’s House of Commons to answer whether he favors surrender or appeasement regarding the American Colonies’ fight for independence. “The difference between appeasement and surrender is a matter of time,” Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) says, “and the waste of another 10,000 young men.” Ring a bell?

That’s the one moment in the film likely to strike most viewers as having any contemporary relevance. It’s clearly well intentioned and probably deeply felt, but its appeal is almost certain to be markedly low in this country, even by indie standards.

Amazing Grace portrays the two-decade campaign in and out of Parliament by Wilberforce (who also wrote the titular hymn) to end the English slave trade. The film was produced to mark with the 200th anniversary of its success in 1807 (though England didn’t emancipate its Caribbean colony slaves for another quarter century.)

The movie carefully, almost dutifully, chronicles the efforts of Wilberforce, a well-born member of Parliament, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberbatch) and liberal foreign secretary Charles Fox (Michael Gambon in a wittily leavening performance amidst the seriousness). But most Americans will be unfamiliar with these historical personages and their colleagues, just as they’ll be puzzled by the Georgian English politics. Ironically, some of the liveliest parts of the movie come during the parliamentary debates, but there’s a lot of sometimes uninvolving backstory, sometimes told in flashback, to sit through.

Apted and company try to humanize the narrative by depicting Wilberforce’s unconventional romance and marriage with Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) and his strained relationship with the sometimes calculating Pitt.

The actors seem determined to avoid seeming like remote historical figures, and often enough they succeed. But the movie’s underlying theme—the daunting difficulty in getting a society to change course and try to redress its errors—likely won’t get delivered. The film would probably have done better business on public TV or the History Channel.