Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) strikes a pose in The Testament of Ann Lee (Searchlight Pictures)
The Testament of Ann Lee is the only movie I can recall watching in the theater recently without someone barking out a disruptive, ironic laugh. And before any anti-laughers scoff in humorless scorn at those who can’t understand cinema without the distancing mechanism of camp, that chuckler is usually me. Yet, the lack of chortling in my hoity-toity 70mm showing was notable and curious. It’s not as if there was any lack of scenes that could have inspired a cackle. I mean, this is a biopic of Ann Lee, the godly anointed leader of those wiggling, waggling Shakers, done as a musical, which translates to copious ecstatic expressions of religious ardor in the form of hooting, hollering, wailing, chest thumping, gyrating, spinning, and, well, yes, shaking. And that’s not even mentioning specific scenes like Shaker follower and funder John Hockell (David Cale) fingering his way to the Shakers’ new home in the New World or Christopher Abbott’s Abraham spanking Ann Lee into fervent celibacy. Ok, fine, I did huff out a quiet snicker when wee towheaded Ann foreshadowed her anti-sex future by chiding her mum and dad for fucking after imagining the serpent in the Garden in a prudish rage. What a little zealot!
Were all the potential hooters quiet because they were silently suffering through what is, admittedly, a peculiarly punishing film, with over two hours of crowd-displeasers like proselytizing and persecution? Or were they, like me, completely enraptured by the euphoric communal worship on screen? So much so that they were ready to profess their faith in Ann Lee as the Second Coming, move to the wilderness, and start hammering out those perfect little chairs, the appearance of which felt like a much-hyped, eagerly anticipated character entrance. A place for everything and everything in its place! And before you say it’s just me, the lover of all spiritual extremity, the woman peeing in the stall next to me post-screening was softly singing one of the movie’s final songs to herself. So there!
My biggest critique is that Fasvold never figured out a way to include this wretched, insulting print of Ann Lee into the film, shown here in the Museum of Sex’s Utopia exhibition (photo by moi)
I understand that warbling tinkler and I are probably not good representatives of a wider audience. Directed by Mona Fastvold and written by Fastvold and her The Brutalist collaborator Brady Corbet, The Testament of Ann Lee is, uh, not for everyone. Just the idea of an Ann Lee musical is so bonkers that it feels like something I cooked up during a flu-induced fever dream. In practice, Ann Lee is a musical for fans of Lingua Ignota/Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter (in fact, I’m a tad disappointed that Fastvold didn’t include her somehow), a true-life tale of a woman whose sex and birth trauma transform her into an asexual prophet! Blessed be! A cradle-to-the-precisely-woodworked-coffin biopic, the movie follows Ann (Amanda Seyfried) from her spiritually curious girlhood in Manchester as she coughs up cotton and samples Methodism before finding a home with the Wardleys, who started a rattling offshoot of the Quakers. Ann, the follower, though, becomes the leader after being arrested for driving the British nuts with all that dancing and singing and binned in the institution, Bedlam, where she used to work. There, she levitates and receives visions from God…or it might be her extreme starvation and dehydration. Either way, these messages tell her she is the second coming and, oh yeah, sex is way out. In fact, fucking is “the root of human sin and misery.” Afterward, Mother Ann tells her gay brother William (Lewis Pullman) to cut his hair and drags her flock to—where else do you go to do weird shit in the late 18th century?—New York.
Now, I won’t lie and say the film is perfect. Thomasin McKenzie’s voiceover narration (as Shaker acolyte Mary Partington) that provides the film’s backbone grates and made me yearn for the days when filmmakers had more confidence in their audience’s ability to follow a storyline. I understand it was supposed to mimic post-Lee Shaker texts like Testimonies of the life, character, revelations, and doctrines of Mother Ann Lee, and the elders with her: through whom the word of eternal life was opened in this day of Christ’s second appearing. Yet I could have gotten that from McKenzie’s spooky opening song, which bears witness to “the woman clothed by the sun.” Christopher Abbott is also underused as Ann’s blue-balled blacksmith husband, Abraham, who is given no internal emotional life other than pregnant, pent-up stares. Yet, the film’s eerie music, stuffed with heavy panting and body thumping, orgasmic choreography, and erotically beautiful cinematography are so intoxicating that who gives a shit. (Ann is right. Who needs sex when you can pray like that?!) The musical’s songs have largely been adapted from real Shaker hymns, including the song, “All Is Summer,” in one of the film’s most astonishing scenes in which Mama Ann and her flock worships, meaning flails about, through sun, blustering snow, and rain on the deck of a ship headed to America, a triumphant depiction of unwavering faith after finally winning the admiration of their fellow sailors when Ann hallucinated an angel saving the ship in a storm. The score is also remarkable, ranging from heavenly children’s choirs to dissonant, ominous slasher strings. Composer Daniel Blumberg makes bold, surprising choices too, whether interjecting a random anachronistic electric guitar during the faith-shattering darkness of 1780’s eclipse that won Ann a bunch of new Shaker fanatics or Amanda Seyfried singing with her heartbreakingly crisp songbird clarity about “Beautiful Treasures” during violent childbirth.
Seyfried’s astonishing and haunting performance as Ann, of course, is the lynchpin of the film and really, the only reason why any of this batshittery works, which is what makes her (and the entire film’s) Oscar snub so enraging (I mean…Kate Hudson, instead?! What boomer shit is that?!). So enraging that I plucked this essay out of a longer piece I’m working on of reviews of recent admired viewings in order to give Ann Lee its due. Yet, those Oscar-voting squares’ refusal to recognize the film is also just so predictable. There is something disquietingly terrifying about Seyfried’s performance–her gigantic blue eyes glazed with the conviction of a true believer as she storms into churches, pounds the floor, speaks in a variety of tongues, and contorts in whirling dervish movements. In particular, her frequent dancerly head bows with her arms crooked to the side feel straight out of a horror movie. Not to mention all the guttural screaming, amusingly preserved on the film’s soundtrack for a chill, relaxing listen. I got the sense that Fastvold, too, was both drawn to and scared of Ann, fascinated yet frightened. What is perhaps most intriguing about the film is that Fastvold doesn’t approach Lee’s self-proclaimed theology with atheist skepticism or distant irony (maybe explaining the lack of laughter). The film hops on board with Lee’s beliefs, without ever losing the grounding that her views may derive from experiences a bit more earthly. But, hey, who is to say Ann Lee wasn’t the female manifestation of Christ?! By the end of The Testament of Ann Lee, I believed!