"Freedom" is about an important subject - the Underground Railroad, which helped thousands of slaves escape from the American South to freedom in Canada. However, it's also about another subject - it traces the story of John Newton, the writer of the famous hymn "Amazing Grace," and it provides some background to the story of his religious conversion after his start as a slaveship captain. The story begins with the escape of a slave family from a Virginia plantation, and follows them on their arduous and dangerous journey north. But that story is chopped up by interspersing the Newton story, with the two stories being somewhat awkwardly held together by a Bible that Newton supposedly gave to a young boy he delivered into slavery in Charleston and that gets passed down eventually to his grandson (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) - who is the one leading his family to freedom more than a hundred years later. The problem with telling the story this way is that neither the story of the Underground Railroad or the story of Newton's conversion is told in the depth that it probably deserves - especially given that the movie is only about 90 minutes in length and so doesn't have a great deal of time to tell even one of the stories had it focused on just one) and so both stories are somewhat choppy.
So the blending of the stories is, as I said, awkward. At times this has a very heavy religious tone with a lot of religious themes (forgiveness, grace, heaven, etc.) That's appropriate in that black slaves really were inspired by Christian faith and that shouldn't be denied, but it seemed a bit too forced at times. There are a lot of hymns and spirituals used in this movie - to the point at which it sometimes seemed as if this was trying to be a musical of some sort. The emphasis on hymns led to at least one anachronism in the movie. With some knowledge of Christian hymnody I was puzzled by the fact that Newton's fiance was singing "It Is Well With My Soul" in church in 1748. That didn't seem right to me, so I quickly researched and, indeed, discovered that the hymn wasn't written until 1876. Somebody really should have checked that out. With so many songs there may have been other musical anachronisms, but that's the one that leaped out at me. I also thought the ending - while perhaps heartwarming - was a bit too far-fetched to be believable.
For all that, I liked the movie. It was very watchable and, as I said, it deals with important topics. It makes the point early on of slavery's brutality as a slave that helped the family escape is brutally beaten while the other slaves are forced to watch. This seems - from the closing captions - to be an attempt to link the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement of the 19th century with the problem of modern day slavery of various kinds. Those captions note that there are 29 million people (I'm not sure where that number came from, and I've actually seen estimates of close to 50 million) held in various kinds of slavery in the world today and encourages viewers to help eradicate it. By all means we should be doing what we can to achieve that, and if "Freedom" helps to shine some light on that problem, then it's serving a noble purpose. (6/10)
