The Testament of Ann Lee-how to film simplicity

Can the layered complexity of commercial narrative moviemaking address simplicity? Recoiling from the 70mm version of THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, an experience initially enhanced by the grand old movie palace hidden inside the Angelika East Village cinema, my mind reeled back to another recent film, TRAIN DREAMS. That film, made for what I may assume was less than the catering budget for TESTAMENT (total budget $10million), carefully crafted the emotional journey of an unadorned and uncelebrated man entirely shaped by his environment, as it alternately picks up and drops him. While these are two very different central characters, TRAIN DREAMS floats on a spare but eloquent script (based on Denis Johnson’s novella) slowly revealing the complexity behind simplicity, while with TESTAMENT we are bombarded, pushed and prodded, production values throwing amped images and audio at us, much of the latter so overlayered that we cannot hear dialogue. Added to the cacophony is voice-over narration, explaining what the film fails to show us (and something I suspect was added because of that). While TESTAMENT begins with an efficient and mostly quite effectively visual outline of her girlhood, Mother Ann’s adult life assaults us, desperate to show the creation of a seeker, a saint. The energy is in the dancing, the music and the cutting, giving us spectacle over substance. A building irony in this film is that an account of the Shakers would wallow in excess, given that simplicity, efficiency, and restraint were central tenets of that faith.

One of the more successful scenes in the film features David Cale (a colleague), as a follower of Lee. Seeking the right place to build their tabernacle, his character becomes possessed, body and voice transformed, while also allowing a touchingly comic aspect to emerge from his very specific and detailed performance. Thus he becomes a kind of simple holy fool, while the other characters, in particular the central leader, strain to be mythic. Perhaps had the writer/director allowed for such exploration in Ann Lee herself, we would have been drawn to her. The real Ann was perhaps quite simple; in one of several unfulfilled dramatic arcs, it is revealed that the sect leader is illiterate, a point not allowed to get in the way of the sect’s deification of her, an elevation the film has little critical distance from.

It isn’t surprising that the actor portraying Ann Lee worked as a model and then a Broadway musical performer in LES MISERABLES. The film reaches for Broadway level spectacle and passionately indicated passion, yet the songs and dances, overproduced as is everything in the film, don’t move the story and, though claiming to be drawn from actual Shaker songs, bespeak a Broadway blast far from any “gift to be simple.” The filmmakers clearly did not trust the Shakers on their own terms, thus the gussying up of everything, the transformation of plain, rhythmic (and by intention not terribly sexy) Shaker dance and song into ecstatic orgies of choral movement and chanting, overamped by orchestration. One longs for the simple life, and the simple film that might illumine it.

Further reading about the film’s production process clarifies that the makers’ intent was not accuracy. My initial impression (“a shakedown of the Shakers as an episode of BRIDGERTON”) is perhaps unfair, as the director and team, by their own accord, were not aiming for accuracy. They speak reverently both of the origins of the music and to what composer Daniel Blumberg (and in parallel, the choreographer, Celia Rowlson-Hall) did with the source material. Such balancing can be tonic when the blend opens up new portals of perception of the source, but here the mix was muddled, unlike (admittedly a stretch) Todd Hayne’s I’M NOT HERE, a gold standard for torquing history while also sculpting startling art.

The quaint relic of historical accuracy should require a level of responsibility in historical fiction. When Ann and troupe, newly arrived in the New World, encounter a very public auction of enslaved Africans, she righteously denounces this denial of freedom. Historic reference and moral point made for our hero, the film moves on, and we do not encounter another Black person until the permanent establishment in Massachusetts, where the presence of a Black woman is established deliberately on a visual level, but without any support from the script, busy as it is underlining Mother Ann’s antics. This is unfortunate, as the film, and the character of Mother Ann, might have had more strength had the makers allowed for the deep significance and historical lineage of a single person denouncing hypocrisy and the delusions of both religion and society. Yes we get that in reference to fornication and the production of children, but not much else. Once the permanent home in Hancock, MA is established, we enjoy a beautifully rendered catalog of Shaker (lack of) ornamentation, with a utilitarian focus on clean and simple lines and the joy of wood joining wood, while the philosophy behind all this is simply repeated as “everything in its place.” Exit through gift shop.