Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation (Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (February 4) I watched a couple of quite interesting movies on LIfetime, including a reality-based drama called Starving for Salvation: The Gwen Shamblin Story. Gwen Shamblin (1955-2021) was a Tennessee native with a college education in dietetics and nutrition, who became convinced that her own struggles with weight, as well as everyone else’s, were really battles with sin. In 1980 she started leading what she called the Weigh Down Workshop, a program of weight loss that emphasized cutting food portions in half, eating only when truly hungry, and transferring your love of food into love of God. (The Lifetime promos for this movie, as well as the title Starving for Salvation, made it look like Shamblin was one of those nutsos preaching that people don’t need to eat at all – I believe they’re called “breatharians” – but, fortunately for the health of her flock, she didn’t go that crazy.) Shamblin started leading weigh Down Workshops in a mall in Memphis. (So many strange things, both good and bad, have gut their start in Memphis; it was the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll and the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as well as the recent controversy over the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five police officers on January 7, 2023.)

According to Shamblin’s Wikipedia page, “The program was offered in about 600 churches in 35 U.S. states by 1994.[12] The program was in more than 1,000 churches in 49 states, Great Britain and Canada by January 1995. The program had grown to about 5,000 churches, with about 10 percent located in Lara's home state of Tennessee, by July 1996.]About eight churches in Britain were hosting workshops in December 1996. Some participants in the U.S. hosted meetings in their homes.” In 1997 Shamblin published a book called The Weigh Down Diet, which sold 1.2 million copies. Shortly thereafter, however, she became disillusioned with the church as it currently stood and she specifically became fixated on the doctrine of salvation. Shamblin decided that the preaching of the standard Christian churches with which most of her participants were affiliated made Christ’s salvation seem all too easy. She also seized on a passage from the Bible that quotes Jesus appealing to God for mercy on the Cross, and decided that meant God alone oould offer salvation and the whole idea of the Trinity was bunk because it made Jesus not only the son of God but God himself. So she started her own church, the Remnant Fellowship, in 1999 in her home town, Franklin, Tennessee.

Shamblin went into full cult-leader mode, demanding that all the Weigh Down employees join the church, forbidding her female acolytes from being divorced or leaving their husbands for any reason, waging legal war on one woman who wanted tl leave the church and take her son with her, apd preaching a hard-core regimen for parents with “problem” children. This latter includes a Black couple named Joseph and Sonya Smith, whom she told to lock their son, Joseph Smith, Jr. (Chidubem Rafael Echendu), in a room with no food, no games and no distractions other than the Bible. When even that form of child abuse didn’t work, Gwen told the Smiths to beat their child with hot glue sticks. (One wondered if the film’s writer, Richard Blaney, was going to do anything with the coincidence that Joseph Smith, Jr. was also the name of one of the most successful cult leaders in American history, the Mormon Church, which prospered and still exists today even though Smith came to a bad end when he was lynched in 1844.) The beginning of the movie shows Gwen Shamblin beinginterrogated by a police detective and accused of promoting child abuse by telling her followers to beat their kids with glue sticks, and when she denies it the detective plays a tape-recorded phone call of her telling the Smiths to do that very thing. Later on we see a longer version of this scene in which Gwen claims the recording was edited or doctored to put words in her mouth that she never spoke.

Along the way she dumps her first husband, David Shamblin (a key character in the movie but the actor playing him is not listed on imdb.com) in 2018, and soon afterwards took up with hot, hunky construction worker Joe Lara (Vincent Walsh, one of the sexiest men I’ve recently seen on TV; he’s done mostly TV movies and series so far, but he also had a small part in Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Saving Private Ryan). By this time I was wondering just what was going to derail Shamblin’s cult. Would she, like Aimée Semple McPherson, fake her own kidnapping so she could spend a hoit weekend with Joe despite her cult’s prohibition on divorce? Would Joe turn out, as one of her staff members warns her, to be a male gold-digger with a history of preying on rich women and robbing them blind? Would she get busted and put on trial for encouraging child abuse? Would her unhappy grown son Michael (Dylan Colton), a talented musician who longed for a secular career instead of having to write typically banal, boring Christian rock for his mom’s church, blow the whistle on it?

None of the above, as it happened; instead Joe Lara insists that Gwen buy him a Cessna Citation jet plane. The dealer who sells it to Joe warns him that, even though he’s licensed to fly propeller-driven planes, jets are a whole different kettle of fish and he also needs to qualify to fly by instruments. In May 2021 Joe offrs to fly Gwen and the upper echelon of her church’s leadership from Tennessee to a church rally in Florida, and of course the plane crashes into a Tennessee lake and all aboard are killed. (So, like Buddy Holly and John F. Kennedy, Jr., Gwen Shamblin died because she flew under conditions that required navigation by instruments with a pilot – in Kennedy’s case, himself – who didn’t have that skill.) What happened to the Remnant Fellowship after Gwen’s death is unclear, though the final scene showing Gwen’s adult daughter Elizabeth Shamblin Hannah (Jorja Cadence) warming up the crowd in Florida awaiting her mom’s arrival suggests that she’d be perfectly capable of taking it over, as indeed she did.

What’s remarkable about Starving for Salvation is that its creators, writer Richard Blaney and director John L’Ecuyer, manage to keep Gwen Shamblin a semi-sympathetic character throughout. We never quite know whether Shamblin was a manipulative bitch or a basically good woman who just got in over her head L’Ecuyer also got a pitch-perfect performance out of Jennifer Grey, the actress who played Gwen Shamblin; tihough she’s naturally a brunette born in New York City, she both loos and sounds right like a Tennessee blonde. Through much of the movie she kept reminding me of Dolly Parton, especially the pitch-perfect Tennessee accent she adopted for the role. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Grey deliberately modeled her voice for the role on Parton’s; at times this film seems like what Dolly Parton’s life would have been if she’d become a cult leader instead of a country-music star.

It would have been so easy for the filmmakers to make Shamblin a ghastly monster from the get0go; instead they adeptly walk the tightrope and make her at least understandable, doing positive things out of the goodness of her heart and negative things as a response to outside pressures and her own nascent sexuality coming to fore when she meets Joe. I hadn’t expected this film to be as good as it was, but it’s one of the better things I’ve seen on LIfetime lately/ Oddly, LIfetime presented this movie at least in part as a “problem film” about eating disorders, including flashing the phone number and Web suite of the National Eating Disorders Association, (800) 931-2237 or https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline, but it’s at once more and less than that. Gwen Shamblin’s beliefs and actions seem to me to go far beyond either her own eating disorder (which according to her Wikipedia page plagued her in her college years) or the false solution she offered for other people’s.