{"id":36676,"date":"2025-09-01T14:53:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T14:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/36676\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T14:53:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T14:53:07","slug":"amanda-seyfried-in-arresting-biopic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/36676\/","title":{"rendered":"Amanda Seyfried in Arresting Biopic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThose of us who first understood Shakerism not as a religious movement but as a mail-order furniture company \u2014 like a particularly elegant, artisanal version of Ikea \u2014 have much to learn from \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee<\/a>,\u201d and a bit to unlearn too. Ascetic simplicity, the quality most conventionally associated with the vanishing Christian sect, is not exactly the order of the day in director Mona Fastvold<\/a>\u2018s blazingly ambitious and busy portrait of its founding mother, which oscillates dynamically between the modes of intrepid New World epic and expressionistic musical. <\/p>\n

\n\tIf the results are as bracingly eccentric as that description promises, they\u2019re also less ironic than you might think. Fastvold and her co-writer\/creative partner Brady Corbet may maintain a cool, analytical distance in their study of an extreme religious movement founded on challenging principles of celibacy and utopian equality, but \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee\u201d isn\u2019t a travesty or a mockery. As a study of unyielding faith practiced on wholly singular terms, it\u2019s raptly respectful and intellectually curious, even if dramatically, it can pall across the course of a languid 136-minute runtime. But it\u2019s as a full-blown song-and-dance affair \u2014 about the least likely, biggest-swinging shape Lee\u2019s story could taken \u2014 that the film is most stunningly persuasive.<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst a caveat: There are no jazz hands in \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee,\u201d though Celia Rowlson-Hall\u2019s startling choreography serves up restless limbs and clawing digits aplenty. Nor are the songs melodically Broadway-ready: Instead, they\u2019re artfully adapted by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg (\u201cThe Brutalist\u201d) from old Shaker spirituals, embedded in a changeable, exhilarating soundscape of discordant strings, tingly metallic percussion and shrill choral wave . <\/p>\n

\n\tBut the musical vernacular is invigorating, caught between quaint historical immersion and reckless anachronism in a way that\u2019s reflected throughout Fastvold\u2019s filmmaking, from mise-en-sc\u00e8ne to performance style. (Her previous film, 2020\u2019s stark 19th-century lesbian romance \u201cThe World to Come,\u201d prepared us for this clash of eras and sensibilities in a far lower key.) Austere antiquity is in constant conflict with more sensual, modern impulses \u2014 a tension that feels productive applied to a story of the Shakers, puritans whom time has proven too pure for this world.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn paper, this might all sound quite bloodless and conceptual. In practice, it has an earnest, full-hearted sweep, in large part thanks to a performance of redoubtable commitment and nerve-deep feeling by Amanda Seyfried<\/a> \u2014 far from the musical terrain of either \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d or \u201cLes Mis\u00e9rables,\u201d but fully in command of her gifts \u2014 in the title role. <\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a stylized prologue (or overture, if you will) that sees a junior Shaker acolyte (Thomasin McKenzie) leading a kind of body-knotting memorial ceremony for the late founder in a Niskayuna forest, we rewind to Lee\u2019s working-class childhood in mid-18th-century Manchester, England, where poverty and paternal abuse combined to give the young girl (played first by Esmee Hewett, then Millie Rose Crossley) a preternaturally stoic demeanor \u2014 along with a horror of \u201cfleshly cohabitation\u201d prompted by early, traumatic sightings of her parents doing the deed.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe finds comfort in her intense bond with her younger brother William (Benjamin Bagota, then Harry Conway), and even more so in her ardent, unwavering Christian faith. This leads her as a young woman to a more aberrantly devout sect led by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her preacher husband James (Scott Handy), informally named the \u201cShaking Quakers\u201d for their practice of violently trembling, seizure-like dancing at gatherings, believed to cleanse the body of sin. She marries rough-hewn laborer Abraham (an excellent Christopher Abbott) and births four children, all of whom \u2014 in a montage of cycling, escalating anguish, beautifully cut by editor Sofia Subercaseaux \u2014 die before reaching their first birthday.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis inordinate accumulation of tragedy is what finally convinces Ann \u2014 much to her husband\u2019s consternation \u2014 that lifelong celibacy is the only way to achieve true closeness to God. That becomes the core tenet of her own offshoot of Shaking Quakerism, which she, William (now Lewis Pullman) and her few followers determine can only thrive away from the dirt and debauchery of Manchester, and indeed the British Isles. Cue a transatlantic voyage to America, where on dry upstate land Shakerism as we recognize it today begins to take shape \u2014 quite literally, as Samuel Bader\u2019s meticulous production design and William Rexer\u2019s linen-textured lensing deftly begin to limn the movement\u2019s signature aesthetic, breaking from the dim, russety visual clutter of the film\u2019s previous chapters. Still, a stable, spreading presence doesn\u2019t come without skeptical resistance from their fellow settlers.<\/p>\n

\n\tDivided into chapters marked by exquisitely designed, archaically worded title cards \u2014 the film\u2019s own subtitle, incidentally, is \u201cThe Woman Clothed by the Sun With the Moon Under Her Feet\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s a robust, often stirring cradle-to-grave saga with more narrative emphasis placed on communal discord and well-being than on individual yearnings and frustrations. That feels spiritually in line with Shaker doctrine, though it yields mixed rewards dramatically: Ann and Abraham\u2019s suddenly sexless marriage merits more screen time and scrutiny, as does her poignant but intriguingly, ambiguously devoted relationship to William. <\/p>\n

\n\tSeyfried, her extraordinary eyes never wider or more steeled with conviction, is quite dazzling as Ann the self-made icon, wielding a poised, peaceable but controlling authority on scene after scene while rarely raising her voice except in lilting song. But, perhaps appropriately, she never lets us past her buttoned-to-the-neck, mother-to-all-and-none veneer: We don\u2019t know what Ann, in her darkest heart of hearts, truly wants from this life and the next. Maybe she doesn\u2019t either.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s in those enthralling, borderline-absurd musical numbers that she attains whatever the Shakers call nirvana, and the film does too: a symbiosis between sound, word and image that genuinely, movingly captures humanity\u2019s desperate reach for the divine. Rowlson-Hall\u2019s ecstatic, thrusting dance direction may take its inspiration from the original Shaking Quaker moves, but it wittily comes to resemble a kind of deconstructed sexual intercourse \u2014 a pursuit of bliss, in whatever form, echoed by starkly repeated, incantatory lyrics about \u201chunger and thirst,\u201d \u201cbuilding and growing,\u201d \u201cloving mother, loving her way.\u201d \u201cThe Testament of Ann Lee\u201d is rich in agnostic questioning and bemused human interest, but at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those of us who first understood Shakerism not as a religious movement but as a mail-order furniture company…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[27118,18,117,19,17,27119,327,27120,11492],"class_list":{"0":"post-36676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-amanda-seyfried","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-mona-fastvold","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-the-testament-of-ann-lee","16":"tag-venice-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}