Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mona Fastvold
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Stacy Martin, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson
Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have quickly followed up their lauded collaboration The Brutalist with another ambitious swing for the fences. Fastvold directs this time, with Corbet as co-writer, as the pair tell the story of Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Christian sect known as the Shakers. But this is no conventional biopic. Working with composer/songwriter Daniel Blumberg and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, Fastvold has transformed Lee's story into an all-singing, all-dancing musical.
The story begins in mid 18th century Manchester, the centre of revolutions of both an industrial and philosophical nature. Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is a young cotton mill employee in a loveless marriage to steel worker Abraham (Christopher Abbott). A series of failed births, rendered in an unflinching and gruelling montage, and her distaste for sexual intercourse lead Ann into the bosom of a small sect known as the "Shaking Quakers," who believe in sexual equality and theorise that God may be a woman. Embraced by the group, Ann is reborn, rising through their ranks to eventually become their figurehead.
Following clashes with the British authorities, who are keen to stamp out any minority religions, Ann and her devotees make the voyage across the Atlantic to New England. There they establish a successful colony, but when Ann refuses to pledge allegiance to America in the War of Independence, the Shakers find they have made a dangerous enemy in their new home.
Fastvold isn't herself a Shaker, so she has no skin in the game when it comes to how Ann Lee and her sect are portrayed. Her film is a curious case of a secular filmmaker fashioning what is essentially a religious propaganda piece. As cults go, the Shakers are relatively harmless, but a cult nonetheless. Every cult leader is a con artist to some degree, but Fastvold refuses to interrogate this side of her heroine. The movie takes a "print the legend" approach to its mythical detailing of this female prophet. Her supernatural abilities, like the power to levitate and a psychic ability to see into the future, are rendered as fact. In one tonally misjudged sequence, one of Lee's followers discovers the ideal place to establish their colony when his finger starts wobbling and leads him to the location, as though he were Bruce Campbell in an Evil Dead movie. I couldn't help but think back to the Vatican-funded Catholic propaganda films I was made to endure in school; this is essentially a very well made cousin of such movies. But where Catholic filmmakers have rankled their church with works like The Last Temptation of Christ, you can't imagine there is anything in this hagiography that might upset a Shaker audience.
As such, it's a largely inert experience, moving from one barely interesting plot beat to another. You can't help but wonder if any filmmaker would be compelled to tell this story on this scale if Lee had been a man. In this depiction, Lee's gender is her only notable feature, and we're left puzzled as to how she was able to hold so many people in her thrall. Granted, if Amanda Seyfried asked me to join her cult I wouldn't hesitate, but I very much doubt the real life Ann Lee had the advantage of Seyfried's ethereal looks. Anyone with a healthy cynicism towards organised religion will wonder if this particular sect is being treated to such a flattering depiction simply because it happened to be headed by a woman.
But what about those musical numbers? Well, we're not talking Bob Fosse or Hermes Pan here. Employing reconstituted Shaker hymns and much animalistic grunting, they resemble a Stomp performance crossed with those exercises Japanese factory workers perform each morning to prepare themselves for eight hours of monotonous labour. Seyfried has a decent set of pipes, but the lyrics are often laughably on-the-nose and most of the energy comes from the sharp editing of Sofía Subercaseaux rather than the performances. Seyfried would make a great Maria if they ever remake The Sound of Music, but her magnetism isn't enough to save this musical misfire.
The Testament of Ann Lee is in UK/ROI cinemas from February 27th.
