Newton's Grace: The True Story of Amazing Grace

Newton's Grace tells the extraordinary and often hard-to-believe story of British poet and Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725-1807), whose life played like a novel full of desultory adventures. As an angry young man, Newton set out to sea, working on several commercial voyages before eventually setting his mind on proposing to a girl he had met during a rare period on land. But Newton was instead forcibly conscripted into service in the Royal Navy, and he initially resolved to make the most of a bad situation, rising to midshipman rank before deserting. Caught, Newton was eventually exiled to a slave-trading island where he endured new lows. Every chapter in Newton's life seems like the stuff of an author's romantic imagination, but it's true, ultimately leading to Newton's conversion to Christian living, rejection of the slave trade (for a while, he was a captain of a slave vessel), and subsequent authorship of the lyrics to “Amazing Grace”—a hymn that he certainly had the personal credibility to write. Writer-director John Jackman does a lot with a small budget to make a convincing, often exciting dramatic bio-pic, drawing cohesive performances out of variously-aged actors playing Newton. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)