Ann Lee an Ahistorical Dud!

 

 

 

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE (2025)

Directed by Mona Fastvold

Searchlight Pictures, 137 minutes, R (brief nudity, violence, adult subject matter)

★

 

I won’t beat around the bush; I hated this movie. I give some credit to Amanda Seyfried for taking a gutsy role and for her vocal dexterity and to William Rexer for his excellent cinematography, but The Testament of Ann Lee should have never been made. It does an injustice to Seyfried, history, tolerable music, biography, and 18^th century faith.

The film is putatively about the Shakers, an 18^th century religious group that began in England and migrated to America under the leadership of Ann Lee. It is often categorized as a cult, a term that carries negative assumptions untrue of the Shakers. Officially they were the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, which is something most Christians believe will occur. The “Shaker” handle comes from opponents who labelled them “Shaking Quakers,” an attempt to link them with an older Pietist group. They bear some resemblance to Quakers in that both broke with the Church of England and emphasized direct connections to God via the Holy Spirit unmediated by ministers or congregations. Their form of “ecstatic” faith was, however, closer to Pentecostalism in their gyrations, emotionalism, speaking in tongues, and prophecies.

Christians have historically been unclear about questions like the end of the world and the final judgment. Shakers were among numerous millenarian groups that believed they were to restore the world, suffer a period of persecution, and await the Second Coming of Jesus. A 1,000-year reign of peace would ensue before a final battle between angels and demons, the sealing of Hell, and the end of the world*. Among the things that made the Shakers controversial was their practices of celibacy, asceticism, pacifism, communal living, and the equality of women. The latter came from the belief that God was both male and female, with “Mother” Ann Lee the female analogue to Jesus. In their view, this meant they were on the cusp of the 1,000-year countdown.

The movie follows Lee from her pious childhood in England to demise at age 48 at Niskayuna (Colonie), New York in 1784. Seyfried plays the adult Lee and highlights her various tribulations–traumatization from seeing her parents having intercourse, the loss of four children before their first birthday, her inability to convince her husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott) of the virtues of sexual abstinence, parting with followers who also rejected celibacy, the burning of a Shaker community in Petersham, Massachusetts, and her brother William’s (Lewis Pullman) fatal beating. She too died from a beating and humiliation shortly after her brother’s death. If the Shakers strike you as too odd to survive, know that they attracted numerous converts, took in orphaned children, and formed 19 communities in the United States. According to estimates, there were 2-4,000 members at their apex. (Today, there remain two elderly women at the Sabbathday Lake community in Maine.)

Director Mona Fastvold gets many of the chronology semi-right, but at the cost of weird decision-making and histrionic depictions of Shaker practices. It is true enough that they danced and sang fervently, but we don’t know exactly how they behaved in those roles. Perhaps they were odd, but is it any stranger than making a musical about the Shakers? Seyfried has a lovely voice, but the music is atonal and the lyrics repetitive and unpoetic. When Fastvold shows the Shakers in the throes of ecstatic bliss, it looks more like outtakes from Moulin Rouge mixed with a clothed orgy than a sacred practice. Mona Fastvold is no Baz Luhrman.

Movies need not be 100% faithful to the past, but when they depart too far from the accepted norm, they fall apart under their own weight. Ann was illiterate and left behind no records or instruction manuals. Fastvole uses the unknown as license for theatrical speculation. To venture another analogy, Ann Lee is like La La Land in Shaker drag. 

 

Ann Lee?

 

Not Ann Lee

 

Memo: Ecstatic dancing is not choreographed. In the period before photography and among people who eschewed vanity and self-adulation, we also lack a reliable idea about Lee’s appearance. She was said to be plain, which Seyfried is decidedly not! Many of the exteriors and interiors were shot at Hancock Shaker Village near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. This includes the round barn, which wasn’t built until 1826, more than 40 years after Lee’s death.

Rob Weir

 

*  There are at least four variants of how earth’s end will occur!