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!

 

Photos Into Kiddie Books at the Eric Caryle Museum

 

 

 

PHOTOS TO PICTURES (and random stuff)

Eric Caryle Museum

Amherst MA

It’s been a long time since I was a kid. Back then, children’s book choices were much more limited. I’m sure there were others, but I only recall Mother Goose rhymes, expurgated Grimm’s fairytales, Little Golden Storry Books, and Dr. Seuss. Today’s kids have many things that tickle their imaginations, a gamut that runs from the magical stories of Jane Yolen and Mo Willems to Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. In my working-class family we didn’t even have A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis, or Beatrix Potter; they were too “limey” (English) for my 1950s-early 1960s family. The closest we got to a Harry Potter-like stories were greatly fictionalized Knights of the Round-table stories. Nor did we have anything from the pen of Eric Caryle.

I only learned about any of these when my nieces were small and former students started having kids. By then, I was a bit long in the tooth to put myself on an extended reading diet of present-day kids’ writers., though a former colleague specialized in children’s books and tried to tell me it was serious literature that was miles beyond Little Golden Story Books, My deeper education came from exploring Western Massachusetts and learning more about Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) who was from Springfield. Then, in 2002, the Eric Caryle Museum of Picture Book Art opened in Amherst. Caryle lived much of his life across the Connecticut River in my town of Northampton. Even I had heard of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it was the word “art” that grabbed me.

I loved comic books once I got out of toddlerdom, but until the Teenage Ninja Turtle creators opened a now-closed (sigh!) museum in Northampton, I never thought of storybooks or comics as real “art.” But when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird dumped the “comics” label for the Ninjas and called them “sequential art,” a lightbulb went on in my head. I went there often and to other museums spotlighting the art involved in my favorite childhood Loony Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons. I still haven’t read many recent children’s books, but I absolutely love the art work. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m ready to be four-years-old again!

Trips to the Eric Caryle Museum doesn’t make me physically younger, but it does allow me to set free my inner four-year-old. I knew from an artist friend that he and his colleagues often work from photographs and a current exhibition at the Caryle Museum highlights how pictures and set ups are (and have been) the basis for the illustrations in children’s lit.

I don’t know the books associated with the following, but I’m fascinated by how photographs and playing with fruit made their way into books. 

 

The above two are from Peter Buckley's Cesare of Italy (1954). They bespeak the poverty but vivid thoughts of Cesare's mind. 

The above two are from Nina Crews setup shots of a young Black child. the top is, of course, "Jack and the "Candle Stick," the bottom is the poem that begins "to market to market..." 
 

Saxton Freyman 

 

This and the header shot are from Children of the Tsaatan Reindeer Herders, a book for kids in Inner Mongolia. Tsaatan means "he who has reindeer." 

 

 

 

The Caryle also has original illustrations that now hang on the wall and are often as detailed as much of the so-called “fine art” that adorns major metropolitan art museums.

 

Robert Lawson, "Little Prince Toofat" 

 

Trina Hyman 

 

 

 

And here are a few others that I simply found endearing and brought a smile to my face.

 

Edward Gorey

 

Eric Caryle

 

 

Rob Weir