As we first understood Shakerism not as a religious movement, but as a mail order furniture company like IKEA’s particularly elegant craftsman version, there is much to learn from “Anley’s Will.” Ascetic simplicity, the quality most traditionally related to ascetic Christian denominations, is not the order of the day in the busy portraits of director Mona Fastbold’s blue, ambitious, busy mother.
If the outcome is as bravely eccentric as the explanation promises, then they are less ironic than you think. FastVold and her co-author/creative partner Brady Corbet may maintain a cool and analytical distance in their study of extreme religious movements based on the challenging principles of singleness and utopian equality, but “Anley’s Will” is neither miserable nor ocky. As a study of uneven faith practiced in completely singular terms, it is dramatically respectful and intellectually curious. But that’s as a full-blown song and dance event, the least likely and most likely shape of the film is the film’s most surprising and convincing.
First warning: “Anley’s Will” doesn’t have a jazz hand, but Celia Lawson Hall’s incredible choreography offers ample restless limbs and claw girders. Also, the song is not ready for Broadway to melody. Instead, Oscar-winning composer Daniel Brunberg (“Brutalist”) skillfully adapts from the spirituality of an old Shaker, embedded in a soundscape of a variable and exhilarating string, embedded in tingly metallic paxions and high-pitched waves.
But the musical slang is exhilarating, sandwiched between quaint historical immersion and reckless anachronism, in a way that is reflected throughout Fastvold’s filmmaking, from Mise-en-Scène to performance style. (Her previous film, Stark’s 19th century lesbian romance “The World to Come,” in the 2020s, prepared us for this era and clash of sensibility at a much lower key.) Strict antiquity is constantly at odds with more sensual and modern impulses.
On paper, this may all sound very bloodless and conceptual. In fact, most have a serious and heartfelt sweep thanks to Amanda Seyfried’s unrespectful commitment and nervous emotional performance, not far from the musical terrain of “Mammamia!” Or “Les Misérables”, but she is completely commanding her gifts – in the role of the title.
After a stylized prologue (or overview, 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’s 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, after which Millie Rose Crossley) has a charmingly stoic attitude – And with the fear of “flesh living” spurred by an early sighting of trauma in which his parents were doing the act.
She finds comfort in her intense bond with her younger brother William (Benjamin Baggota, Harry Conway), and even in her passionate and unwavering Christian faith. This led her to a younger woman into a more unusually respectful denomination led by Jane Wardley (Stacy Martin) and her preacher husband James (Scott Handy), who trembles violently and practices of seizure-like dance at a gathering that was unofficially named the “Sway Quaker” and believed to cleanse the body of sin. She marries Abraham (the excellent Christopher Abbott), a rough worker, and gives birth to four children. Everyone dies before reaching their first birthday, cycling, escalating anguish montage, beautifully cut by editor Sophia Subelkasau.
This incredible accumulation of tragedy ultimately convinces Anne to the surprise of her husband that lifelong singleness is the only way to achieve true intimacy to God. That becomes the core core of her own derivative that shakes the quacalism determined by William (now Lewis Pullman) and several followers. Queue your transatlantic voyage to America. There, we are beginning to recognize it today with land shakerism in the dry-up state. Samuel Bader’s meticulous production design and William Lexer’s linen textured lenses cleverly limit the aesthetics of the movement’s signature, breaking from the dimly lit visual clutter, and beginning to cleverly limit the visual clutter before the film. Yet, a stable and widespread presence cannot come without skeptical resistance from fellow settlers.
It is divided into chapters marked on exquisitely designed, archaic, literal title cards. Coincidentally, the film’s own subtitle is “The Woman Who Covers the Moon Under the Moon.” It often stirs the grave-to-grave saga slowly from the scent of the cradle with narrative emphasis rather than the year and frustration of the individual year, and more than the joint inconsistency and happiness. It feels spiritually lined up in line with Shaker’s doctrine, but it dramatically brings mixed rewards. Anne and Abraham’s sudden, sexless marriage deserves more screen time and scrutiny, as well as her moving but interesting, vaguely committed relationship.
Safried, her extraordinary eyes never pack steel with wider or more convictions, but as dazzling as the icon of Anne the Self-Made, she doesn’t speak up except for the light-hearted song, wielding calm, peaceful but controlled authority after the scene. But perhaps appropriately, she never passes us all mother and non-none veneer from her buttons. Maybe she won’t do that either.
It is the enchanting, borderline Absuld musical numbers that she achieves anything that Shaker calls Nirvana, and so does the film. Truly, the hopeless reach of humanity for God is the symbiosis of sounds, words and images. The direction of the ec-pusking dance with Rowlson-Hall’s ec may draw inspiration from the original shaking Quaker movement, but it resembles a kind of dismantled fuck. “Anley’s Will” is rich in agnostic questions and confusing human interest, but at such a shining peak, FastVold believes in us all.
