Product: The 19th Wife (2010)
Rating: 3.0
A Bit Stilted and One-Sided
This movie gets its "based on real life" story across, but is rather amateurishly produced. The characters sometimes seem to be coming onstage from the wings to recite their lines, as if they were performing in a high school play. A lot of the story is told through successive visits that the characters make to the prison where the devout Mormon woman accused of killing her husband is being held. This device adds a further static, staged quality to the proceedings.Most of the characters are also presented as stock types, incapable of any gradation of feeling. They are either all right - or all wrong. The head of this branch sect of Mormonism is a thorough-going bad guy, virtually a comic book villain.Most of the males in this sect are represented simply as "lecherous old men intent on accumulating as many young wives as possible." That may in fact be what some fanatically fundamentalist religious cults come down to. But many such groups at least start out with a vision of communalism, with a sense that "it takes a village" to raise children and to carry on the necessary work of family life. There's no suggestion of any such positive intention here. Only the darkest abuses of the polygamous lifestyle are seen.The current action is intercut with flashbacks from the life of one of Brigham Young's wives. Just as that earlier victim of polygamy saw escape as her only option - escape seems as if it might have to be the only option for the heroine in this modern Mormon sect.The question of who committed the murder almost takes second place to this question of whether the heroine will make the break or not, and if so, whether she'll make it safely out of the clutches of the threatening sect elders.Although I was certainly rooting for the heroine, I couldn't help but feel just a mote of uncertainty about the kind of freedom that would lie ahead of her. She'd be exchanging the presumed constraints of the long, uniform pioneer-style dresses that women in the sect had to wear - for the presumed breeziness of mini-skirts and make-up. But would that actually be exchanging an obligation to exclusively please one man for the larger obligation to please all men in passing? This movie doesn't entertain any such subtleties of doubt.