Outtakes: Movie summaries 4848
The September 11 depicted in September Dawn was a dark day in American history, but it wasn't the day the twin towers fell. No, the 9/11 so luridly detailed in September Dawn occurred 150 years ago, in 1857, when 120 men, women and children were herded together on a pleasant stretch of Utah known as Mountain Meadows and brutally massacred by Mormon zealots.
As subtle as a pitbull in heat, September Dawn sinks its teeth into the parallels between the two 9/11s and doesn't let go until it's drawn blood. The 120 victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre were guilty of nothing more than professing to a faith different from that of their murderers, and while the movie's 19th-century Mormons may not be exact stand-in's for modern-day Islamists, they're close enough for discomfort. September Dawn is an unusually fanatical screed against religious fanaticism, and it's not above some ruthless embellishing to drive home connections to our contemporary clash of civilizations.
September Dawn promises no walk in the park for Muslims, but there's something here to offend nearly everybody, and the movie is all but guaranteed to do for Mormons what The Passion of the Christ did for Jews. September Dawn is actually related to Mel's movie in more ways than one, both films being bound up in ready-made controversy (the sort that often translates into box office) and both being purportedly high-minded historical accounts that seem to have more to do with Saw III than with being faithful to history.
The movie opens with its prime mover, Mormon founding father Brigham Young, portrayed in foreboding close-up by Terrence Stamp and looking every bit as iconic and unyielding as one of those stone faces on Mt. Rushmore. Brigham Young's involvement in the massacre has never been proven, but here he oozes deviousness from the get-go, a Mormon Godfather imperiously holding court while spewing a skewed and vaguely sinister account of the events we're about to see. Young's brooding image eventually segues into that of an innocent, fresh-faced Christian lass who conjures up a flashback of her own, and September Dawn is off and running.
Rife with the sort of clunky dialogue and narrative short cuts associated with bad made-for-TV movies, September Dawn shows its hand straight off as the kindly Christian pilgrims, making their way from Arkansas to a new life in California, enter Mormon territory and, with absolutely zero provocation, immediately declare that there's "something wrong with the place." Scant moments later, their suspicions are apparently confirmed when the local Mormon boss-man shows up, played by Jon Voight, sporting one of those weird little tufts of chin foliage favored by Satanists and at least one former U.S. Surgeon General now shilling for "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up" infomercials. Who wouldn't be scared?
The movie has a field day cross-cutting between the gentle Christians and the oppressive, fear-based community of Mormons, who demand their kids marry young and (for the men) frequently, and toe the party line under penalty of death. In one memorably hammy sequence, the movie even transitions between a smiling Christian minister offering up thanks to a God of love and a Mormon bishop fairly frothing at the mouth while beseeching a god of vengeance to wipe out the cursed "gentile dogs." For what it's worth, the film does partially explain the Mormons' mindset, alluding to the rampant religious persecution prompting paranoia of outsiders plotting against them. But this is barely a footnote to the unmitigated bloodlust wallowed in here.
The two communities are portrayed as so wildly dissimilar that it should come as small surprise that a movie as single-minded as September Dawn filters its culture clash through a simplistic Romeo-and-Juliet story. Jonathan (Trent Ford), the hunky but sensitive horse-whisperer son of the Mormon ringleader, falls for the minister's cherubic blonde daughter, Emily (Tamara Hope), and within moments, violin strings are swelling on the soundtrack as the star-crossed couple makes goo-goo eyes at one another.
Shots of glowering, increasingly uptight Mormons segue with gauzy passages in which the movie's young lovers frolic as if fresh from The Blue Lagoon by way of Little House of the Prairie until things finally come to a head and the powers-that-be demand "a virtuous act of mercy" — the slaughter of the Christian infidels. Accounts differ as to what really happened on September 11, 1857, but the way the movie has it, the settlers were deceived into giving up their guns, promised safe passage by the Mormons, then led defenseless and unsuspecting into the sunny field where they were unceremoniously mowed down.
The movie ends with what it's been promising all along — a slo-mo bloodbath on a scale that might have made Sam Peckinpah weep with envy. But despite appropriately elegiac music and quasi-poetic camera angles, there's no moment of truth to be found here, no emotional catharsis or even visual elegance. The violence is plain and predictably exploitative, catering to pretty much the same dreary impulses that dictate every porn-flick money shot. It all culminates in a finale so audaciously inept you almost have to love it: The camera weaves through the gore, settling on one young Mormon psycho who, having finally realized he's lived his entire life in a zombie trance, begs his tearful sibling to put him out of his misery.
If Mitt Romney wasn't squirming by this point, he certainly would be when Brigham Young shows up again, calling himself the "Second Mohammed" (just in case we haven't yet made the connection) and commanding death squads of Latter Day Saints who roam the hills slitting throats and terrorizing the populace. "I am the voice of God," booms Brigham, an egomaniacal boogeyman nearly as larger-than-life as Stamp's General Zod in Superman II (who was also frequently mistaken for God) and twice as mean. Not exactly subtle stuff, but here, at any rate, September Dawn manages to at least put on a good show.
Stamp, as usual, is a force of nature — and Voight has his moments here, too — but the bulk of the performances in September Dawn are barely passable and most of the characters hardly more than cartoons mouthing poorly written dialogue. Lacking either the kick of camp or the authority of meaningful drama, the movie methodically drains the nuance from what might have been a consummate tragedy of miscommunication, substituting old-school sensationalism masked as insight. Future generations of bored cineastes may appreciate the unintentional irony and subtext, maybe even declaring September Dawn some sort of exploitation cult classic, but for now, I'd rather be hanging with those happy, shiny polygamists from Big Love.
This article appears in Aug 22-28, 2007.