“While the speech is fiction in detail, in spirit it is moving and fundamental.”

I’ll have to remember to cite this in the [oh-so-unlikely] event I want to defend some non-historical event or speech or person as being the way history should have been but wasn’t.

And you ask a significant question: Did witnesses to iconic moments realize what they were seeing? Even something like the First Vision — obviously Joseph realized he was experiencing something extraordinary, but without knowing the Lord as well as he eventually came to know him, without knowing what would grow out of those minutes in the Grove, could he *really* have understood the significance? Probably not, and maybe we ought to keep that in mind when we evaluate history.

And not just the great and grand events of scripture, like the parting of the Red Sea, but also events of this dispensation, from the mighty events of the First Vision and the dedication of the Kirtland temple, to the mundane every day life of our ancestors.

I’d like to see the look on my grandfather’s face when he was a young boy and arrived in America as he got off the boat from Europe.

But real life doesn’t have the background music, the score, like a movie does. There was no orchestra playing when Brigham Young said “This is the place.” Did he, Wilford Woodruff, and the other present “get a feel” for the momentousness of that occasion? Was it anything like we feel when we see re-enactiments or read about it?

If understood as historical fiction, it is bearable to watch, but we found ourselves giggling (or laughing uproariously) a little too frequently. The peculiar sequence of events, the villains, the galling historical inaccuracies. At one point my husband called it “hysterical fiction.”

But I will admit that I had to wipe a tear from my eye when Brigham Young said, “This is the place.”

It’s the sort of movie that might be fun to watch some late night with a bunch of sleep-deprived Mormon history types.

On a serious note, Clair’s article (see comment 23) points out some of the objections we had to the story, but it also points out the fact that it was so superior to any previous movie about the Mormons that it was embraced by many members of the church, and I agree that the portrayal was largely positive.

Like Porter Rockwell said: “Hallelujah!”

(He was funny.)

Clair’s account covers the story from the church’s point of view rather than the studio’s — you ought to check that out as a complement to the post here at Keepa.

That is a great idea.