Romney Campaign Braces for Controversial Mormon Film

Aug. 24, 2007 — -- The reviewers have not been kind to "September Dawn," the new semi-fictionalized movie about the 1857 massacre of 120 people, including children, by a group of Mormon extremists in southern Utah.

The Washington Post sneered at "poor battle choreography, the wooden editing and the cheesy writing." The Kansas City Star blasted the film as a "stridently anti-Mormon and cliché-heavy melodrama ... so ham-handed as to feel like blatant propaganda."

The almost uniformly poor reviews of "September Dawn" could be good news for presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is Mormon, if they dissuade people from going to see the movie, which opened Aug. 24 in 800 to 1,000 theaters nationwide.

The movie portrays the band of Mormons who carried out the attack as icy, grim-faced religious extremists driven to mass murder by their own paranoia and fanatical fundamentalism. The film version depicts Mormon icon Brigham Young being complicit in planning the attack. In the bloody climax -- the incident that's come to be known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre -- dozens of defenseless men, women and children are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned and hacked to death.

It may be unfair, but this grotesquely negative image of this particular group of Mormons has the potential to influence how some viewers -- and voters -- perceive the religion and by extension, Romney.

"The problem for Mitt Romney is there is a surprising -- and dangerous -- amount of ignorance about his faith among voters generally," ABC News political analyst Mark Halperin said. "He has avoided trying to educate the public to reduce the suspicion that exists, and, unfortunately for him, that vacuum for at least some moviegoers is going to be at least partially filled by this film. It doesn't threaten his candidacy, but I can't argue that it helps him."

Romney's Mormon faith is already somewhat of an obstacle for his candidacy. A July poll by ABC News found that 63 percent of Americans said they would be comfortable with a Mormon as president. But 34 percent said they would be "somewhat" or "entirely" uncomfortable with a president of that faith. The number rose to 41 percent among self-described evangelical Protestants.

Romney is well aware that many -- maybe even most -- Americans know little or nothing about the Mormon religion, and view it with curiosity or even suspicion. The candidate's inner circle continues to debate whether he should deliver "the Mormon speech," which would be similar to the one presidential candidate John Kennedy gave in 1960 to say that his Catholicism would not influence his actions as president.

The Romney campaign did not reply to an e-mail asking for comment about the accuracy of the movie and how it might affect his candidacy. Previously, Romney remarked to The Associated Press about the Mountain Meadows Massacre: "That was a terrible, awful act carried out by members of my faith. There are bad people in any church and it's true of members of my church, too."

Matthew Purdy, a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, declined direct comment on the movie, adding, "We believe the weight of historical evidence shows that Brigham Young did not authorize the massacre. This evidence included a letter that Brigham Young sent to Church members in southern Utah to let the wagon train pass. Unfortunately, the letter arrived two days too late."

The Mormons involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre killed everyone in the wagon train except for 17 very young children. Today, the date of the attack resonates ominously. It was Sept. 11. The reasons for the attack are complicated but, in part, it was because the Mormons believed the settlers were allied with federal troops dispatched to Utah to suppress them.

In an historical treatise on the Mormon Web site, Richard Turley wrote: "For a century and a half, the Mountain Meadows Massacre has shocked and distressed those who have learned of it. The tragedy has deeply grieved the victim' relatives, burdened the perpetrators' descendants and Church engineers generally with sorrow and feelings of collective guilt (and) unleashed criticism on the Church."