These of us who first understood Shakerism not as a non secular motion however as a mail-order furnishings firm — like a very elegant, artisanal model of Ikea — have a lot to be taught from “The Testament of Ann Lee,” and a bit to unlearn too. Ascetic simplicity, the standard most conventionally related to the vanishing Christian sect, isn’t precisely the order of the day in director Mona Fastvold‘s blazingly bold and busy portrait of its founding mom, which oscillates dynamically between the modes of intrepid New World epic and expressionistic musical.
If the outcomes are as bracingly eccentric as that description guarantees, they’re additionally much less ironic than you may suppose. Fastvold and her artistic associate Brady Corbet might preserve a cool, analytical distance of their examine of an excessive non secular motion based on difficult ideas of celibacy and utopian equality, however “The Testomony of Ann Lee” isn’t a travesty or mockery. As a examine of unyielding religion practiced on wholly singular phrases, it’s raptly respectful and intellectually curious, even when dramatically, it could pall throughout the course of a languid 136-minute runtime. However it’s as a full-blown song-and-dance affair — in regards to the least seemingly, biggest-swinging form Lee’s story may taken — that the movie is most stunningly persuasive.
First a caveat: There aren’t any jazz fingers in “The Testomony of Ann Lee,” although Celia Rowlson-Corridor’s startling choreography serves up stressed limbs and clawing digits aplenty. Nor are the songs, artfully tailored by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg (“The Brutalist”) from outdated Shaker spirituals, melodically Broadway-ready. However the musical vernacular is invigorating, caught between quaint historic immersion and reckless anachronism in a method that’s mirrored all through Fastvold’s filmmaking, from mise-en-scène to efficiency type. Austere antiquity is in fixed battle with extra sensual, trendy impulses — a stress that feels productive utilized to a narrative of the Shakers, puritans whom time has confirmed too pure for this world.
On paper, this may all sound fairly cold and conceptual. In observe, it has an earnest, full-hearted sweep, largely due to a efficiency of redoubtable dedication and nerve-deep feeling by Amanda Seyfried — removed from the musical terrain of both “Mamma Mia!” or “Les Misérables,” however totally in charge of her items — within the title function. After a stylized prologue (or overture, if you’ll) that sees a junior Shaker acolyte (Thomasin McKenzie) main a form of body-knotting memorial ceremony for the late founder in a Niskayuna forest, we rewind to Lee’s working-class childhood in mid-18th-century Manchester, England, the place poverty and paternal abuse mixed to provide the younger woman (performed first by Esmee Hewett, then Millie Rose Crossley) a preternaturally stoic demeanor — together with a horror of “fleshly cohabitation” yielded by early, traumatic sightings of her dad and mom doing the deed.
She finds consolation in her intense bond together with her youthful brother William (Benjamin Bagota, then Harry Conway), and much more so in her ardent, unwavering Christian religion. This leads her as a younger girl to a extra aberrantly religious sect led by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her preacher husband James (Scott Useful), informally named the “Shaking Quakers” for his or her observe of violently trembling, seizure-like dancing at gatherings, believed to cleanse the physique of sin. She marries rough-hewn laborer Abraham (a wonderful Christopher Abbott) and births 4 kids, all of whom — in a montage of biking, escalating anguish, superbly lower by editor Sofia Subercaseaux — die earlier than reaching their first birthday.
This inordinate accumulation of tragedy is what lastly convinces Ann — a lot to her husband’s consternation — that lifelong celibacy is the one technique to obtain true closeness to God, which turns into the core tenet of her personal offshoot of Shaking Quakerism, which she, William (now Lewis Pullman) and her few followers decide can solely thrive away from the grime and debauchery of Manchester, and certainly the British Isles. Cue a transatlantic voyage to America, the place on dry upstate land Shakerism as we acknowledge it immediately begins to take form — although not with out some skeptical resistance from their fellow settlers.
Divided into chapters marked by exquisitely designed, archaically worded title playing cards — the movie’s personal subtitle, by the way, is “The Girl Clothed by the Solar With the Moon Below Her Toes” — it’s a strong, typically stirring cradle-to-grave saga with extra narrative emphasis positioned on communal discord and well-being than on particular person yearnings and frustrations. That feels spiritually in keeping with Shaker doctrine, although it yields combined rewards dramatically: Ann and Abraham’s instantly sexless marriage deserves extra display screen time and scrutiny, as does her poignant however intriguingly, ambiguously devoted relationship to William.
Seyfried, her extraordinary eyes by no means wider or extra steeled with conviction, is sort of dazzling as Ann the self-made icon, wielding a poised, peaceful however controlling authority on scene after scene whereas not often elevating her voice besides in lilting music. However, maybe appropriately, she by no means lets us previous her buttoned-to-the-neck, mother-to-all-and-none veneer: We don’t know what Ann, in her darkest coronary heart of hearts, actually needs from this life and the following. Possibly she doesn’t both.
It’s in these enthralling, borderline-absurd musical numbers that she attains regardless of the Shakers name nirvana, and the movie does too: a symbiosis between sound, phrase and picture that genuinely, movingly captures humanity’s determined attain for the divine. Rowlson-Corridor’s ecstatic, thrusting dance route might take its inspiration from the unique Shaking Quaker strikes, however it wittily involves resemble a form of deconstructed sexual activity — a pursuit of bliss, in no matter kind, echoed by starkly repeated, incantatory lyrics about “starvation and thirst,” “constructing and rising,” “loving mom, loving her method.” “The Testomony of Ann Lee” is wealthy in agnostic questioning and bemused human curiosity, however at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.
