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'September Dawn' movie review |
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Written by Robert W. Butler, MCT
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
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SEPTEMBER DAWN
2 stars
Director: Christopher Cain
Cast: Jon Voight, Terence Stamp, Trent Ford, Tamara Hope.
Rated: R for violence. Some dialogue in Indian dialect with English subtitles.
Running time: 1:45
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The Mountain Meadow Massacre was one of the Old West's most disturbing incidents and should be rich material for a gripping film.
"September Dawn," a stridently anti-Mormon and cliche-heavy melodrama, isn't that movie.
The facts aren't in dispute. In 1857 a wagon train of California-bound immigrants stopped in southern Utah to rest and resupply. The Mormans who had settled there a decade earlier were in a tizzy, expecting an invasion by U.S. troops who would replace their theocracy with federal law. Plus, they were still paranoid about the murder years earlier of their prophet, Joseph Smith, and the persecution that drove them from Illinois and Missouri.
Leaders of the Mormon militia convinced local Indians to lay siege to the camp in Mountain Meadow; after several days the Mormons rode up under a white flag, telling the battle-weary immigrants to lay down their arms. Then the Mormons murdered approximately 130 men, women and children, sparing only those too young to testify against them.
Historians disagree on whether the Mormon leader Brigham Young gave his approval for the slaughter and his role in the subsequent cover up.
That's some heavy-duty history.
But this film from director Christopher Cain ("Young Guns"), while doing a good job of laying out the historic facts, is a dramatic muddle. For starters, he and writer Carole Whang Schutter employ the "Titanic" template, putting in the foreground star-crossed lovers whose romance plays out against a stormy background.
They are Emily (Tamara Hope), daughter of the preacher with the wagon train, and Jonathan (Trent Ford), son of the local Mormon bishop, Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight). The Bishop sends Jonathan's to spy on the immigrant camp, where he falls for the strong-willed Emily. Mostly they keep telling each other "I've never met anyone like you before."
As romances go, this one is extremely tepid. So are the two young actors.
Meanwhile the Bishop is whipping his brethren into a frenzy, railing that a woman immigrant (Lolita Davidovich) who wears pants and a sidearm is an "abomination" and that it would be a favor to slit the unwelcome Gentiles' throats and send them on to heaven. He irresponsibly claims that in the wagon train are Missourians responsible for the murder of Joseph Smith.
Voight plays this role with all the subtlety of the late Donald Pleasance doing one of his scripturally inspired homicidal maniacs. The high point here has him leading his followers in a chant: "Blood atonement! Blood atonement!"
Nor do Cain and Schutter equivocate about the role of Brigham Young (Terence Stamp). They provide a scene of him approving the massacre in advance. (Doubtful, since Young was in Salt Lake City, 300 miles and two week's journey north of Mountain Meadow).
And then there are a couple of flashbacks in which the director's son, Dean Cain, portrays Joseph Smith. In one of these the Prophet is shown leading a mob to destroy the presses of a newspaper critical of Mormonism.
Though largely based on historic fact, "September Dawn" is so ham-handed as to feel like blatant propaganda. The film is painfully unsubtle and in the end borderline laughable.
Production values are a notch or two above your History Channel original programming, but contain too many anachronisms (firearms that weren't produced until several years later, modern-looking cowboy hats, impossibly clean clothing and turns of phrase that certainly weren't used in the 1850s). That same sense of dislocation extends to the performances — they don't feel like they belong to the 19th century.
Don't expect to see "September Dawn" at your local Mormon Visitor's Center. Or, for that matter, on anybody's list of recommended movies.
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