Reviews

This movie exceeded all expectations, which were already very high. All kudos to Emilio Estevez for an excellent screenplay and superb direction. The photography, too, was wonderful. I think this will go down as one of Martin Sheen's best ever performances. He underplays his role (due to Emilio's direction?) which makes it all the stronger. In fact, it's the understated quality of the whole film that makes it very moving. It never descends into sentimentality but you still feel the grief of Martin Sheen's character as he makes the pilgrimage his estranged dead son never completed. At the same time, there are a lot of funny moments, which lift it from becoming a depressing journey. The gradual coalescing of the four very different main characters into a unified group works very well. Each of them has a different reason for making the pilgrimage and, to begin with, they seem to have nothing in common, but it's still very believable when they start to relate to each other. Emilio and his father Martin have every reason to be very proud of this film. It works on every level.

This was an inspiring film about William Wilberforce and his efforts to ban the slave trade in the British Empire (not just to ban slavery in Britain as some reviewers have suggested).

I have always connected Wilberforce with banning the slave trade, but did not realise how just how difficult his struggle had been. Nor did I fully appreciate before just what vested interests he had to oppose.

Ioan Gruffudd was superb as Wilberforce, wrestling with his faith, and his political career; Albert Finney as John Newton, the slave owner- turned Christian, has turned in what must be one of his best performances ever (Oscar for best-supporting actor must be on the cards here) and Michael Gambon as Charles Fox was exactly as I had always visualised Fox.

The film was sometimes confusing with its flashbacks - maybe a few more subtitles showing actual years would have helped with this? Also, for me, one of the most pertinent statements - and I cannot now remember who said this - was that in Britain the workers in the mines and the mills were almost in the same position as the slaves - owned body and soul by their masters. The only difference being that they had not been deported forcibly from their homeland.

But then the film was more about the slave trade i.e. the boats in which they were transported - horrendously - and less about the conditions under which the slaves later had to work.

One step at a time - and it was a start, the deportation of slaves ended in the British Empire in 1807 and globally in 1833.

The treatment and eventual freedom of slaves was longer in coming, and of course full civil rights for the descendants of those slaves took another century in the USA. Maybe Wilberforce was in a sense 'reincarnated' in Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jnr.