Young Washington and Minions & Monsters both offer tales of our great nation’s history, but only one really captures it.
At the end of Young Washington, an anodyne account of the Founding Father’s formative years, Kelsey Grammer, who has a small role in the film as Washington’s mentor Thomas Fairfax, appears on screen to make a direct appeal to the audience. Using the same “pay it forward” strategy that the film’s distributor Angel Studios used to make the child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom a box-office hit, Grammer urges you to scan a QR code and buy someone else’s ticket, which counts as a sale whether or not anyone actually takes you up on the offer. “With your help,” he urges, “Young Washington can be America’s No. 1 movie on the 250th anniversary of our nation’s birth,” and “we can send a message loud and clear that America and the principles that helped shape her are still worth fighting for.”
The trouble is that it’s not clear what those principles are meant to be. Sound of Freedom might have been sordid agitprop based on exaggerated statistics and a self-appointed crusader’s misleading accounts, but it at least boiled down to a message clear enough that you could put it on a hat. When Young Washington’s story wraps up in the mid-1750s, the issue of independence isn’t even on the table, and George Washington (blandly played by the British newcomer William Franklyn-Miller) has barely begun to demonstrate the military savvy that would place him up at the head of a successful insurgency. Given Grammer’s MAGA credentials, it might be possible to extract some kind of strained allegory from the valor of Washington’s scraggly militiamen as contrasted with the regimented ineffectiveness of the British army. But given that the two forces are still fighting toward the same objective when the movie ends, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Although the outreach campaign is clearly designed to target aggrieved right-wingers tired of having liberal Hollywood’s priorities shoved down their throats, the movie itself feels like a time capsule from a less polarized era, when conservative values put more emphasis on meritocracy than mass deportation.
As fate would have it, the movie Young Washington is seeking to ou
