In my personal opinion, this is the perfect response to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Both movies exist on some kind of a feminist spectrum, but Ann Lee is able to do so without all the surface-level “girl power”/“men are dumb simple creatures” messaging that the Barbie does. Another big similarity between the two films is that both movies are centered around female characters that have no interest in sex or romance. Ann Lee preached heavily about celibacy and Gerwig’s Barbie rebelled against the idea of the title character being the romantic interest of Ken.
A big difference between the two films is The Testament Of Ann Lee doesn’t really think about men in comparison to Barbie. One could argue that Barbie accidentally centers the male characters at certain points. Think about it - Ryan Gosling's performance as Ken is just as synonymous with the Barbie movie as Margot Robbie. Amanda Seyfried completely carries this Ann Lee biopic. There are male co-stars but none are as memorable or as important as her. I appreciate that approach. Barbie tries to provoke and lightly troll a particular type of male at times ("film bros", misogynists, women-haters, loudmouths, jerks, etc). Ann Lee doesn't really concern itself with men. There’s nothing more silly and pointless than putting in a lot of effort to troll a group of people that already can't stand you or don't care what you do. We've reached a point where changing the gender or the race of a character in a story is done mostly now to annoying and poke at people rather than to make a genuine piece of art. There's nothing worse than grown adults like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh crying over updated iterations of things like The Little Mermaid or Harry Potter using female, trans or Black actors. But at the same time, I can't stand people who can only approach art from the standpoint of just bothering or annoying someone. How old are we??
I don’t have a "fragile male ego" either. If you think men are big dumb children - fine. Just stand ten toes down on your opinion. Don't dip your toes in and out. Don’t pander to septum nose ring twitter and instagram moms that lie about their life being hard when it isn’t if you only half-heartedly feel that way. It’s phony and disingenuous.
To Be Clear - I enjoyed Barbie overall but a big portion of that movie plays out like it was made for people that like to mindlessly retweet and reshare lighthearted surface-level “men are dumb” posts all while adoring their husbands and wearing “boy mom” shirts. Hating men and/or thinking they’re trash is perfectly fine I guess. Just be genuine about it. I respect folks that claim to dislike men as long as they really live that life. If it’s just your online persona or something you like to profess only when you’re around other women, then you’re just corny and pandering for nothing.
If I had to compare Ann Lee to something else - I’d say it’s very "Robert Eggers-coded". Eggers is a heavily influenced director himself and he hasn’t done or created anything new in cinema, but I don’t know if there would be a lane for this movie to exist right now without semi-recent stuff like The Witch or The Northman.
And, similar to Eggers' films, Ann Lee has some light Dreyer imagery. While they aren’t identical in any way, the funeral scenes at the end of both films are kind of similar to me (minus the resurrection in Ordet).
A big flaw with this movie is the weird run time and all the history that is skipped over. This is a highly speculative retelling of the life of Ann Lee - an influential figure in the evangelical movement during the mid-late 1700s. The film starts at her birth and ends with her death which was brought on from complications of a physical attack. In between, we follow her religious journey from joining the Quakers to branching off to the Shaking Quakers to forming her own religious sect; The Shakers. There’s a lot of religious and world history to cover in her story. I wouldn’t have been mad if this was a mini-series or a show on a streaming service for the story to flesh out more (the movie also has voiceover narration that feels like it was tacked on after the fact in order to make it easier to follow).
The Testament Of Ann Lee certainly shows the evil that men do while still making women the center of the story. It should also be noted that the different religious sects that the movie focuses on are all based in the belief that the second coming of Christ will be a woman.
I don’t have a "fragile male ego" either. If you think men are big dumb children - fine. Just stand ten toes down on your opinion. Don't dip your toes in and out. Don’t pander to septum nose ring twitter and instagram moms that lie about their life being hard when it isn’t if you only half-heartedly feel that way. It’s phony and disingenuous.
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| Barbie / The Testament Of Ann Lee |
I don't think any of this was intentional but even the moment where we are introduced to Ann Lee's husband is right out of the scene in Barbie where Ken first tries to dance with her...
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| Barbie / The Testament Of Ann Lee |
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| The Passion Of Joan Of Arc / The Testament Of Ann Lee |
And, similar to Eggers' films, Ann Lee has some light Dreyer imagery. While they aren’t identical in any way, the funeral scenes at the end of both films are kind of similar to me (minus the resurrection in Ordet).
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| Ordet / The Testament Of Ann Lee |
You should never expect a biopic to capture and address everything, but this movie has the time to drag out elements that aren’t all that necessary while speeding through entire periods of Ann Lee’s life that are incredibly important (her various times in jail, the loss of all her children, her travels outside of just New England, etc). The Testament Of Ann Lee has a runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes which is such an odd length for a movie. I’ve been saying this since the start of this blog but a biopic needs to be an 85 minute film focused on a specific isolated period of time or it needs to be a minimum of three hours if we’re going to cover someone’s entire life like this movie does. The same core team behind this movie was also behind the almost four hour Brutalist. I wonder why Ann Lee wasn’t fleshed out the same way The Brutalist was. I would have loved to see this movie take the same approach as Peter Watkin's Edvard Munch.
I don’t really like this movie but I'm glad that it exists because it can’t be digested or critiqued by simple-minded disingenuous folks like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh. Male and male-centered critics that want to preemptively tear apart a movie for having feminist ideals or not making men the centerpiece can’t really process something like The Testament Of Ann Lee because it doesn’t have an evil central male character to represent all men. Again - this movie is very flawed to me but I'm glad it exists.
