September Dawn
Director: Christopher Cain. Screenplay: Christopher Cain, Carole Whang Schutter. Cinematography: Juan Ruiz Anchia. Film editing: Jack Hofstra. Production design: Rick Roberts. Music: William Ross. Producers: Christopher Cain, Scott Duthie, Kevin Matossian. With: Jon Voight, Terence Stamp, Lolita Davidovich, Jon Gries, Dean Cain, Trent Ford, Tamara Hope, Taylor Handley, Huntley Ritter, Shaun Johnston, Hal Kerbes, Daniel Libman, Barbara Gates Wilson. Canada. 110 min. 2006.
By David Sterritt
The original 9/11 was in 1857, when members of a Mormon militia in south Utah decked themselves out with ritual Native American gear, solicited help from their Paiute Indian allies, opened fire on a group of pioneers headed west in a wagon train, offered safety to the travelers if they’d leave the area, and then led about 120 into a nearby field and slaughtered the lot of them, little kids included. The atrocity became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and to this day the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints refuses to admit complicity in it, claiming that the killers were renegades acting on their own. Another story comes from more-neutral commentators—and from Christopher Cain’s movie—alleging that church president Brigham Young knew of the impending butchery and allowed it to proceed. The slayers were led by John D. Lee, a friend of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr., close associate of the church’s early leaders, and loving (?) spouse of no fewer than 19 wives. It took two trials to convict him of his central role in the mass murder, but in 1877 he met his fate before a firing squad on the very spot where the massacre occurred. To its credit, the LDS church had excommunicated him seven years earlier. To its discredit, the church took him back into the fold, posthumously and gratuitously, in 1961.
This fascinating piece of history is sure-fire movie material, but Cain has managed to bungle the job in a pretty big way. For starters, he’s tacked a romantic subplot onto the main narrative, with the son of a Mormon bishop falling in love with one of the pioneer women, against whom the old cleric (played by Jon Voight, who has seen better days) invokes ominous scriptures about the deadly evil of women who dress like men, i.e., wear dungarees, and carry weapons, i.e., arm themselves against attack at a time when the wild West was really wild. More generally, Cain doesn’t know how to sustain dramatic momentum for more than a few minutes at a time, and when he goes for a shock effect—a castration, for instance, featuring a nailed-to-the-wall scrotum that looks weirdly unscrotumlike—the results are often risible.
Voight has a high old time hamming it up as the bishop. By contrast, Terence Stamp seems sadly disgruntled in his Brigham Young outfit, and the women of the story (Lolita Davidovich, Tamara Hope) don’t make much of an impression. The movie’s best moment comes near the beginning, when Cain cuts between the hopeful prayers of the pioneers and the malicious ones of the bishop’s Mormon clan, suggesting that religion can go horrifically astray if you don’t keep your eye on it every minute. But after that it’s all downhill. Whatever else people make of the movie, you have to admit it won’t exactly boost Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Even a wind as ill as this blows some good!
