I just saw “Ephraim’s Journey,” which is essentially another take on — with a different perspective — of “17 Miracles,” which details the sufferings of one ill-fated handcart company that traveled to Utah; “Ephraim’s Rescue” deals mainly with the other handcart company’s suffering. The movies are very religious, with oft-repeated legends of miraculous healing, a visit by one of the Three Nephites, and the raising of the dead being treated as fact by director T.C. Christensen.
Christensen, who is the new main director of Mormon cinema, is talented. The cinematography, pacing and action moves the film forward. There are moments of mild humor, which humanizes the characters. Although you don’t realize this while watching, virtually all the characters in “Ephraim’s Rescue” look like members of your own LDS ward, or the crowds milling through a BYU football game. (It reminds me of a recent pundit, relating a visit to a Mormon ward, who remarked that the LDS pictures of Jesus Christ remind him of how Jesus was depicted in the 1950s.)
Although I tend toward skepticism on miracles, as an active Mormon, I’ll give “Ephraim’s Rescue” a thumbs up. It does what it seeks to do — raises the testimonies of many of the faithful. It’s moving to see an historical overview of the sufferings of the handcart companies and a review of the desperate efforts to rescue the stranded handcart pioneers. However, let’s be honest, the film is a slick, better-produced reproduction of the filmstrip LDS history movies we’ve seen in Mormon primary and Sunday schools.
In fact, T.C. Christensen’s handcart tragedy films remind me of “The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt,” the martyred Mormon apostle. I love that book and have read it at least a dozen times. It’s full of early Mormon history miracles. In one section, LDS Church member Philo Dibble, left for dead by a bullet wound, is healed instantly. In another anecdote, Parley P. Pratt heals a child of Mr. Wandle Mace, who was in the last stages of brain fever. These are just two of many anecdotes. In “Ephraim’s Rescue,” the title character raises the dead twice and heals many of the sick. In one scene, Ephraim heals the frostbitten-destroyed feet of a major character so effectively that the healed man dances a Jig, lifting the spirits of the handcart company survivors. (This may sound silly in my blog, but you have to see the film.)
This is where Mormon cinema has evolved over the past 13 years. We’ve gone from the gritty missionary drama of Richard Dutcher’s “God’s Army” (scenes include a black man mocking a black missionary and an apostate elder leaving a believing elder speechless) to the “correlation-approved” sanitized biographical films of Emma Smith and Joseph Smith, as well as Christensen’s Sunday School historical dramas.
The baker’s dozen years of Mormon cinema’s evolution was dictated chiefly by economics. The vast majority of films released to theaters did not make money. Dutcher’s two follow-ups, “Brigham City,” and “States of Grace,” (desperately pitched as “God’s Army 2″ in Utah) did not make money, although both were excellent films — even better than “God’s Army” — which challenged LDS beliefs and assumptions by deconstructing the doctrine through various situations. In “States of Grace,” there is a powerful analogy to the “burying of weapons” story from the Book of Mormon.
After the gritty era of Mormon cinema, the genre moved mostly toward comedies that riffed off Mormon culture. There was “Singles Ward,” “Church Ball,” “Mobsters and Mormons,” “The RM,” The Home Teachers” and so on. There was also an attempt to make LDS romance films, such as “Charlie” and “Baptists At Our Barbecue,” (both based on books and BTW, “Baptists …” directed by Christian Vuissa, is a great film) and a slew of romantic LDS-themed comedies, including riffs on “Beauty and the Beast” and even “Pride and Prejudice.” There were more serious LDS mission-related films, including “The Best Two Years” and “The Errand of Angels.”
It bears mentioning that there were efforts to produce bigger-budgeted LDS-themed films. “Book of Mormon Movie,” “Passage to Zarahemla,” and three movies from the popular LDS fiction series, “The Work and the Glory” were produced. They just didn’t make money. In fact, the “Work and the Glory” films, financed by the late Larry H. Miller, have likely lost more than $10 million, and that may be a conservative estimate. (In the post-Dutcher era, the most critically acclaimed films may have been the “Saints and Soldiers” World War II-era films, released in 2003 and 2012.)
By 2010 most independent films produced for Mormon audiences were being released directly to DVD with a maybe a token theatrical release in Utah. In 2011, my family saw “Joseph Smith: Plates of Gold,” in a theater but it was shown in a DVD format! (A good site to keep up on Mormon-themed films is http://www.ldsfilm.com/)
Mormon cinema that makes it to theater screens has evolved to meet the needs of its chief audience, active Mormons. That need is faith repetition, or perhaps more optimistically called faith-promoting. As mentioned, I enjoy the films, but I miss the challenges to our assumptions in the earlier films, in which characters who deeply believed in Mormonism sometimes succumbed to the temptations of passion, loneliness, and rage. Even the silly films, “Singles Ward, ” “Home Teachers” or “Church Ball,” have more honesty. They riff on the Mormon culture, which is a safe but tempting target. The only “riffs” in “Ephraim’s Rescue” are a couple of mild jokes on polygamy.
The main events of Mormon-themed cinema have moved into the bowels of the church. It will be interesting to see if there is a serious effort to move part of the genre back into independence.
-- Doug Gibson
-- First published in 2013 at StandardBlogs
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