As of last summer, there were only three Shakers left, up from a more recent two but down from thousands in the religion’s height in the mid-1800s. Plenty of movements from that time have since died out, but the Shakers face a particular uphill battle given their commitment to celibacy, meaning they can’t just make a new generation of Shakers. The movement once grew through conversion and adopting children, but these days, few people want to live the Shaker life of communal austerity and hard work. But what feels outdated and even conservative today was once a radical break with the status quo, and it’s that perspective that the quasi-musical, quasi-biopic The Testament of Ann Lee viscerally captures.
The film stars Amanda Seyfried as the titular Ann Lee, a religiously-minded child in England who falls in with a group of “shaking Quakers,” later known as Shakers. Ann marries a neglectful husband and loses four children in infancy, and this drives her closer to the group and into the belief that sex is mankind’s ultimate sin and needs to be renounced. She comes to see herself as the second coming of Christ in female form, and as “Mother Ann” leads a small group of Shakers to America, where their unusual physical worship style and credo of “hands to work, hearts to God” spread throughout the country alongside other utopian movements.
The movie hews fairly close to what’s known of the actual life of Mother Ann, which has mostly been passed down through her adherents. (In a move that drives this home, the story is narrated by one of her followers.) The first half, before the group moves to America, is harsh and arresting; their worship moves in and out of intentional choreography and chaotic twitching, and composer Daniel Blumberg rearranges Shaker spirituals to include instruments or writes his own songs. The Testament of Ann Lee isn’t quite a musical, in that songs don’t happen at the peak of emotion; instead, song and dance weave themselves into both worship and narrative and then fade away, keeping the viewer off-balance and contributing to the sense of the Shaker movement as strange and otherworldly. Before seeing the movie, I’d made fun of a teaser trailer quote that called it “fearlessly feral,” but I get it now: For a movie about a religion devoted to celibacy, the whole thing is carnal and sexual, as the film’s young, attractive cast shakes and writhes to the Shakers’ distinctive music and Blumberg’s strange, creative arrangements.
It would be easy to fall into reductiveness here–Ann Lee was burned by sex, so she started a religion to rebuke it–and while Testament’s loose structure keeps it from coming to any kind of conclusion that would disappointingly drive that idea home, the film feels like it has more to say about sex than it does faith. Things lose focus and intensity once the group moves to America and builds its first commune in upstate New York. The passion that moves the group’s worship or its clashes with suspicious outsiders and societal institutions is largely absent once the community is on its own, and Seyfried never quite feels as convincing talking about God as she does defending the Shakers from the rest of the world. There are beautiful shots of the woods and of Shaker handicrafts and architecture, and a lovely montage of Shaker life set to a weird, moody arrangement of “I Love Mother,” but Testament becomes a bit adrift in the space between the group’s arrival in America and Mother Ann’s ultimate death.
While it might falter as a narrative, the music is what carries the movie through, and the way the arrangements and dance try to portray a specific feeling of Shaker worship. The film’s best intensity and emotion is here, and it’s here that it does the most with its subject matter. I’m a huge fan of Shaker spirituals and their unique musical structure, and while I never think they’re improved by adding instrumentation, Blumberg’s bells and electric guitars and choruses make them feel otherworldly, not quite rock music and not quite worship songs. He turns “I Hunger and Thirst” into a moment that could be at home in any musical; he turns “Beautiful Treasure” into something like a sad lounge number. The plain language of Shaker songs, like many hymns of their day, have always stuck with me; unlike so much modern worship music that seems to want to feel relatable to secular life, Shaker songs are so clearly about religious longing and the Shakers’ communal life, an honesty and intimacy that has kept them relevant even as the movement itself has faded. They become something new here, but they still long so strongly for something other than this world, and this conveys the passion of faith in a way the film’s script doesn’t. I loved the way familiar-to-me refrains weaved in and out of the movie’s soundtrack, even if it was missing some of my favorites and, perhaps wisely, the better-known songs.
Likewise, Testament’s choreography grabs at what was so shocking and threatening about the early days of the Shaker movement. Shaker dance changed over time, becoming more structured and eventually fading away altogether. Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall turns what we might today think of as old-timey dances into something aggressive and passionate, and in doing so, as Blumberg does with the music, expresses something challenging and even frightening about religious faith.
Testament doesn’t attempt to sum the Shakers up, or make a pitch for revitalizing the faith. The strange structure of the whole film, and the way the story just sort of happens, paints a picture of the flow of religious movements during the Shakers’ time, when new faith movements sprung up by the dozens in an effort to revamp not just religious institutions, but society as a whole. People tried to take life in new directions, directed their hopes and fears toward something bigger than themselves, and those things arose and fell away and new things took their place. The beliefs that mean the most to us, that can seem world-altering, become lost to history or woven into it, and radical movements can become quaint oddities as time marches on.
Testament’s greatest strength, then, is expressing how Shakerism might have felt back then, the disruptive potential of its beliefs, worship, and way of life. The way its music and choreography aren’t separate from the story, and the way it infuses them with modern aesthetics, tells a story that feels new and weird in the current landscape of film in a way similar to how the movement itself would have felt in its society. Even as it stumbles in the space between the secular and the spiritual, it gets at something radical and true.
Riley MacLeod
