The Testament of Ann Lee, a new film by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, is a bold example of what I have come to call Hollywood’s retroactive repression.
Retroactive repression is when the film industry, eager to virtue signal and punish historical America for its unenlightened ways, makes a movie depicting our past as a hellscape of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the usual catalogue of our supposed original sins. Examples abound: The Help. Mississippi Burning. The Long Walk Home. Men of Honor. Mona Lisa Smile. Pleasantville. Remember the Titans.
Retroactive repression is the artistic cousin of “punitive liberalism,” a term coined by James Piereson, which describes the left’s desire to punish America for her sins.
Retroactive repression films can be technically quite good, even as their plots can be plodding and annoying as they put America in the stockades, every time.
Such is the case with The Testament of Ann Lee. Amanda Seyfried stars as Lee, a real person who was born in 1736 in Manchester, England. Lee loves God and works hard, but she is put off by the number of babies her mother is having. Lee eventually marries a blacksmith (Christopher Abbott’s Abraham), but she feels called to celibacy and to expressing the charisma of God through dance and movement. The high mortality rate of newborn children at the time in Ann Lee is depicted in gruesome, horror-movie detail. Lee herself loses four children in childbirth. She begins to think she is being punished by God for ignoring her belief that celibacy is the path to true holiness.
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