Jason Patric plays the title character in this period piece during pre-Civil War times. He's, well, journeying home from selling his home-grown goods, and comes across Thandie Newton, a runaway slave. After a brief internal conflict, he decides to help Thandie find her freedom. Together they go on both a physical and emotional journey throughout the course of the film.

While there are some very well-acted scenes, this is a pretty common plot line of movies that take place in the 1800s. The Journey of August King isn't the best anti-slavery movie out there, but it is far from the worst, so if you like the abundant emotions, moral lessons, and historical beauty of the time period, you'll definitely want to add this one to your list on an autumn afternoon. Somehow the southern landscapes always look even more beautiful during the fall season, don't they? Kiddy warning: Depending on how much your kids know about slavery, you might not want them to watch this one just yet.

Although there have been numerous films about the American Civil War, from "Gone with the Wind" to "Cold Mountain" via "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Glory", films about the antebellum South and its "peculiar institution" of slavery are rarer. Stephen Spielberg's excellent "Amistad" from 1997 is one recent exception, and "The Journey of August King", dating from two years earlier, is another.

The film is set in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1815. August King is a young, recently widowed, farmer who inadvertently becomes involved in the attempt by a young female slave to flee from her cruel master. At this period aiding a fugitive slave was a criminal offence, but King decides to help her anyway, even though he knows that such a step could end in his ruin. The girl appears to have several names; at one point she claims that her real name is, bizarrely, "Williamsburg", but that she is generally known either as "Annalees", sometimes shortened to just Anna, or as Ella. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to her as Anna throughout.

The plot is fairly simple. King takes Anna in his cart to help her on her journey, but every so often she is forced to hide when other people come into view. Her owner Olaf Singletary, who it turns out is also her natural father, has offered a large reward for her recapture, and King cannot trust anyone, even his neighbours, not to betray him. Visually, the film gives the impression that the North Carolina Appalachians in the 1810s were a pristine, virtually uninhabited, wilderness; we see plenty of scenes of forests and mountains but very few of houses, other than King's own, or of cultivated farmland. Yet the frequency with which King and Anna's journey is interrupted by the sudden appearance of other people would suggest that this seeming wilderness is in fact densely populated, as teeming with people as the most intensely farmed lowland areas.

Despite a similar theme, "The Journey of August King" is not in the same class as "Amistad", certainly not when it comes to acting. Spielberg's film could call on some splendid performances, especially from Anthony Hopkins and Djimon Hounsou, but there is nothing of that calibre here. Most of the characters come across as a bit one-dimensional. Singletary is simply an evil stage villain. Anna is a mixture of liberty-loving free spirit and playful minx. Thandie Newton is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a black British Hollywood superstar, but this is not really one of her better films, not as good as she was in "Flirting" or "Jefferson in Paris". Her accent here seems to vary between a near-incomprehensible local vernacular and something much closer to Standard English.

August is clearly written as a more complicated character. We are never quite sure of his exact motives for helping Anna. Opposition to the institution of slavery? (The film makes it clear that some white Southerners did indeed oppose slavery and that abolitionism was not confined to the North). Simple humanitarianism? Guilt arising from the death of his wife (which , we learn, was an act of suicide)? Or has he fallen in love with the attractive Anna? At one time the film seems to be setting up a romantic ending, with August and Anna falling in love and eloping together, but then seems to draw back from it, possibly because of Hollywood's traditional squeamishness about mixed-race love affairs. It is indeed possible that August acts out of a mixture of motives- the various possibilities set out above are by no means all mutually exclusive. The problem is that Patric never gives us much of a clue, playing his character throughout with a noble, stoical saintliness which never really hints at any greater complexity below the surface.

As another reviewer has pointed out, films made in aid of good causes or about Big Themes are not automatically good films. Just as the recent "The Reader" has shown that it is possible to make a bad film about the Holocaust, so "The Journey of August King" shows that it is possible to make a mediocre one about slavery. Morally it is very worthy, but ends up as uninspired and rather dull. 5/10

This is a morality tale that will have you wondering "How would I handle this type of situation? You hope you would do the right thing but there are consequences that may conflict with your conscience. This wonderful film will definitely make you examine your conscience. Besides all that, it is a beautifully crafted masterpiece with superior acting by Jason Patric and Thandie Newman as well as the supporting cast. As mentioned, it takes place in a beautiful part of our country, magnificently photographed by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. The pacing is perfect, the brilliant music score by Stephen Endelman is emotionally appropriate, the script perfection, in fact, everything about this film is beautiful, except the attitude and the horrors of the pre-Civil War era. The fact that human beings were, and are, being treated worse than animals is a shameful fact about the human race. This film reminds us and jolts us smack in our conscience! I highly recommend it to every human being. BTW, I wish a CD of the music score existed. I'd buy it in a heartbeat!