Ms. Field’s character is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill mother. Neither a garden-club belle nor a land’s-sakes-alive-I-smell-something-burning-in-the-oven domestic, she’s a methodical, no-nonsense pragmatist who wants to tie up all the loose ends without making knots. She hires her own nurses, makes her demands for cremation, and writes her own obituary. When the cancer eats her digestive system and her bowels malfunction, she is still in love with life enough to order spare ribs, savor the flavor and spit out the rest. That’s the good part. The bad part involves the mental and physical disintegration that turns her into a Brussels sprout as the cancer drags on, plunging her in and out of consciousness while she moans and hallucinates and controls her pain with a push-button morphine drip.

Meanwhile, her devoted daughter Em (Julianne Nicholson) organizes her siblings in a 24/7 watch that involves cleaning up the vomit, changing the sheets and other gruesomely detailed chores. Oldest son Keith (Ben Chaplin), a recovering alcoholic; middle son Barry (Tom Cavanagh, who talks the way he does in Gray Matters, with machine-gun fire that isn’t always coherent); and youngest son Matthew (Glenn Howerton)—accompanied by his pouting, jealous wife (Clea DuVall), whom the rest of the family despises—all react to the ordeal in separate ways. They make some major decisions quickly, like shipping the ashes and closing out their mother’s bank account by forging her signature, to avoid probate lawyers. But they also argue over who gets to keep the leftover morphine and who gets the Percodan. Old friends drop by with tuna casseroles to reminisce with their mother about their old boyfriends and the size of their johnsons. Throughout all of these daunting daily punishments, they ignore the feelings and emotions of their stepfather, who has shared the house with their mom for 14 years. Director Stockman gets it down right, while we suffer through every minute of it.

I admire the integrity and the artistry that illuminated this film, and I most keenly appreciate Ms. Field’s total lack of self-indulgence and refusal to give in to the temptation to beg the audience for pity. But still. How fulfilling can it be to spend half of the movie turning green and puking all over the place, her open mouth a grotesque mask of torture like a George Grosz drawing, and the other half of the movie in a coma with the rasping sound of a death rattle? Somewhere in all of this agony, a point is made about not only the dying but the caregivers, and a question is posed about the problem of where to draw the line between responsibility to a dying parent and responsibility to oneself. Some sympathy must be reserved for the survivors. Not for the weak of heart and not for anyone seeking lighthearted fare, Two Weeks is a worthy, thoughtful film about grave issues, but I’d be surprised if it lasts even two weeks in the theaters.

Full of Grace

Beautifully made and deeply inspiring, Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace is a captivating historical drama about William Wilberforce, the impassioned member of the British Parliament in the 18th century who devoted his political career to ending the slave trade.

Forcefully played by the excellent Welsh star Ioan Gruffud (ah, those Welsh names—impossible to pronounce, spell or remember!), Wilberforce is first seen in 1797 as a disillusioned shell of a man, once a political leader whose name was synonymous with bravery and idealism, one of the few Parliamentarians with a conscience and a sense of humanity and justice for the poor and disenfranchised, leading the abolitionists in their crusade to end the slavery that had become a common practice in England’s new colonies in the New World. As the narrative moves backwards 15 years, we see the younger Wilberforce, a firebrand heralded at a young age for his sense of integrity, fearless in the face of adversity and undaunted by the moral indifference of his greedy, ruthless fellow Parliamentarians, which included Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Clarence (another masterful performance by the quixotic chameleon Toby Jones). His reform-movement principles were strengthened by John Newton (the garrulous Albert Finney), a former slave-ship captain for 20 years who repented and became a minister of the gospel, and reinforced by his supportive best friend William Pitt (Benedict Cumberbatch), who became the youngest prime minister of England at the age of 24.

Charming and attractive, Wilberforce married Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai), an early advocate of women’s rights and famed champion for liberal causes, who was so opposed to slavery that she wouldn’t allow anyone in her presence to use sugar in their tea if it came from Jamaican plantations that used slave labor. She inspired her husband to keep up his fight even after his bills were defeated, adopting the hymn “Amazing Grace” as their united theme song. The movie explores their colorful home life in a manor house filled with animals that were encouraged to run free (to the horror of visiting guests), as well as Wilberforce’s activism, marriage and long, arduous struggle to pass laws to abolish slavery in the House of Commons.

Depictions of the frank and harrowing realities of life and death on slave ships—the humiliation, degradation and cruelty suffered by slaves with broken hips and shoulders dislocated by shackles—are scenes that are not for the faint-hearted. But the elegance of Mr. Apted’s direction, the balanced script by Steven Knight and a tremendous cast that includes Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell and the versatile Mr. Jones (far removed from his electrifying performance as Truman Capote in Infamous) all conspire to keep you riveted through every defeat and sabotage, and when the film culminates in Wilberforce’s final, decisive showdown against his political enemies, I daresay you’ll be cheering. A stunning tribute to the victory of good over evil that is appealing to both the heart and the mind.

Golden Gates

Beyond the Gates revisits the fiendish barbarity of the Rwandan genocide that slaughtered 800,000 Africans in 1994. It was a time when the persecuted Tutsis left their homes and fled from the ruling Hutus to whatever safe haven they could find, watched over by only a few scattered peacekeeping forces dispatched by the United Nations, who did little more than watch the massacres with indifference. One refuge was a tourist hotel that was taken over by its own employees, as dramatized in the film Hotel Rwanda. Another was a secondary school in Kigali called the Ecole Technique Officiele, once an army base that was turned into a refugee camp to shelter 2,500 Belgian soldiers, schoolchildren and innocent Tutsi citizens while the rampaging Hutu militia clamored for blood, waving machetes outside the school gates.

Beyond the Gates, directed by the excellent Michael Caton-Jones, chronicles the events that took place within the school before and after the U.N. troops withdrew, taking the white sympathizers with them. John Hurt plays the dedicated Catholic priest who remains behind to die with the Rwandans he pledged to protect. Hugh Dancy, the hot new British dreamboat currently starring on Broadway in the revival of Journey’s End, is the idealistic young teacher who cares deeply for the doomed students and friends whose lives he has affected, but who flees with the diplomats, expatriates and U.N. troops in an act of moral cowardice to save his own. When the Tutsis were deserted to a reign of terror, the Hutus moved through the gates with knives, machine guns and grenades. David Belton and Richard Alwyn, two of the film’s writers, were among the few journalists who survived. This movie is their tribute to the 2,500 victims they knew at the school, some of whom actually lived to work on this film as actors, electricians, grips, wardrobe assistants, prop masters and assistant cameramen, and to tell their saga without embellishment. The result is a movie about choice, fate and failure that submerged the world in shame.

That shame is still being felt, suffered and written about by people who have not forgiven the lack of response by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, which even went so far as to lobby the U.N. Security Council to ensure that no further U.N. forces were sent to Rwanda. (The excuse was that they were too otherwise occupied in Bosnia.) The bigger political issues and the refusal of the Western world to intervene gnaw at the edges of this movie throughout, but it is really the human portraits of the people that keep you engrossed. Hugh Dancy’s Joe Connor is movingly torn between his loyalty to the children who trust him and his need to flee the approaching apocalypse. He’s naïve, fearless and fair. He’s also the one who asks, “Where is God here, in all this suffering?” But in the end, like so many whites in Rwanda, he fails to stick around to find out. John Hurt’s noble Father Christopher, who stays behind where his heart and soul are, is based on a Bosnian priest named Vjeko Curic, who risked his life daily smuggling Tutsi women and children out of Rwanda in the bottom of the school’s delivery truck, and kept BBC correspondents Belton and Alwyn alive after the invasion of the Hutus to tell their story, first on television, then in Beyond the Gates. It is certainly a story worth telling, although it’s no secret that we live in a world where the cultured, inquisitive and humane are vastly outnumbered by brain-dead slugs. This is sad, because Beyond the Gates is educational as well as inspired—a valuable contribution to the power of the cinema of truth.

As the title of the film indicates, Mr. Apted’s project also involves the parallel story of the writing of the famous Protestant hymn by the guilt-ridden former slave-ship captain, John Newton, who turned to serving the church to redeem his tormented soul. If my prose turns somewhat purple on this occasion, it is because I was genuinely moved by the hymn’s power in the film to combine Christian faith with a worthy social cause at a time in our lives when many of the ills of the world are being attributed to religious fanaticism (in lands including our own).

Mr. Apted has painstakingly assembled a remarkably gifted cast to enliven his and Mr. Knight’s story, beginning with Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce—who was elected to the House of Commons at the age of 21 in 1780—and is shown from the outset as a frenzied youth given to meditating on his spiritual conflicts while sitting on the wild grasses of his vast estate. He is urged by his closest friend, William Pitt (played with equal youthfulness by newcomer Benedict Cumberbatch)—at age 24, the youngest British prime minister in the nation’s history—to champion the cause of the abolition of the slave trade, and eventually of slavery itself.

Wilberforce did not marry Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) until 1797, when he was 37, in a whirlwind courtship facilitated by her outspoken support for the abolition movement. The film doesn’t extend the full length of their happy and fruitful 35-year marriage (until his death in 1833, three days after the Abolition of Slavery Bill passed in the House of Commons at the third reading). Wilberforce left behind six children from his union with Barbara, and was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Mr. Apted compresses much of this personal history with one lyrical passage of Wilberforce romping in the fields with his first son and namesake, William, and a stirring concluding passage of the funeral rendition of “Amazing Grace” by a single bagpipe and a full military band outside Westminster Abbey. In between are many rowdy, bewigged scenes in and out of Parliament, emblazoned by a covey of marvelous character actors, notably Michael Gambon as Lord Charles Fox, an early convert to the cause; Ciaran Hinds as Lord Tarleton, a demagogic antagonist; Toby Jones as the sly slave-owning Duke of Clarence; and Bill Patterson as the double-dealing Lord Dundas.

Albert Finney delivers two bravura scenes as John Newton, a powerful influence on Wilberforce in his decision to enter the hurly-burly of the political arena, rather than seek refuge in the relative tranquility of the church. Rufus Sewell plays Thomas Clarkson, the roving firebrand of the abolitionist movement, going so far as to advocate a people’s revolution against the British Crown in emulation of the French Revolution across the Channel. This was much to the horror of Wilberforce, ever loyal to King George III, though everyone there, as here, knew that he was mad. Indeed, George III—a much-maligned monarch in American history books—was a decisive behind-the-scenes influence in keeping Pitt in power despite his many unpopular reforms and abolitionist sympathies.

The Grammy-winning Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour plays the crucial role of Oloudah Equiano, who wrote a best-selling memoir of his extraordinary experiences as a self-liberated slave. He joined Wilberforce’s movement as a firsthand witness to the cruelties of the slave trade, which Wilberforce could only imagine vicariously from his privileged perspective. Together with the resourceful Clarkson, Equiano provided the documentary evidence that shifted the balance in the popular struggle between the abolitionists and the powers that be.

The relevance to our time is made clear by the film’s emphasis on the then-new forms of public persuasion, like pamphleteering and badge-wearing, long before the bloggers and the Internet revolutionized mass communication. When a huge cylin der of paper is unfurled on the floor of the House of Commons with 300,000 signatures on a petition denouncing the slave trade—with cries of “mob rule” by the defenders of the status quo—the effect is electric. When Lord Charles Fox rises dramatically from his seat to add his own signature to the petition, the unprecedented bonding of the people with their Parliamentary representatives is complete.

The wealth of biographical material from the stormy lives and times of Wilberforce, Pitt and Newton alone can barely be hinted at in a feature-length film. Hence, Wilberforce’s love of animals is randomly reflected in a few moments of picking up strays in a variety of species—hardly sufficient to convey the lifelong commitment that made him one of the founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA). The primitive level of medical care and diagnosis is suggested by the untimely death of Pitt (1759-1806) in the midst of his second term as prime minister, from what seems to have been nothing more than a perforated ulcer from previously misguided “cures” using wine. Still, Mr. Apted, Mr. Knight and all their collaborators on both sides of the camera can take pride in a humanist hymn for our eyes and ears, at once lucid and lyrical to an exemplary degree.

Out of Africa

Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (Indigènes), from a screenplay by Olivier Lorelle(in French with English subtitles), has been nominated as Algeria’s official entry as Best Foreign-Language Film in the 79th Academy Awards. It has already received a rapturous reception in France, where it has struck a historical nerve with its belated recognition of the sacrifices of 130,000 North African colonial soldiers (or indigènes) in helping liberate the “fatherland” from the hitherto impregnable German Army.

The action begins in 1943 in Morocco, where an army of indigènes is being assembled for the eventual invasion of Italy and France in 1944. The fictional story follows the varying fortunes of four soldiers—Abdelkader Bellaïdie (Sami Bouajila), Saïd Otmari (Jamel Debbouze), Messaoud Souni (Roschdy Zem) and Yassir Allaoui (Samy Nacéri)—as they encounter various forms of discrimination from their French officers. These include the lack of promotions, the denial of leave, and on one occasion even the withholding of fresh tomatoes from the colonials so that an ample supply remains for the French troops.

Nonetheless, the indigènes remain loyal and fight bravely in battles in Italy, Provence and Alsace, taking heavy causalities while receiving little or no recognition or publicity. French President Jacques Chirac and his wife, Bernadette, were reportedly so moved by a special screening at the Élysée Palace that Mr. Chirac ordered an end to a decades-old system of inequality by bringing the lagging pensions of war veterans from former colonies up to the level of their French counterparts. It is one of the rare instances I can recall when a film had such an immediate beneficial impact.