My Assessment of Under the Banner of Heaven

 

 

I always have a love-hate relationship with the Emmy nominations as readers of this column are well aware of. Last year, for example, I wasn’t particularly pleased with many of the nominated and omitted limited series. But I was actually relieved by one particular omission: Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

A couple of weeks prior to the nominations the Hollywood Critics Association had nominated Under The Banner of Heaven for several major awards, including Best Limited Series, Best Actor for Andrew Garfield and Supporting Awards for Wyatt Russell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. I was in the process of deciding which major series to start watching in preparation for the Emmys and while I was more than willing to get onboard with Hulu’s Dopesick and The Dropout, Under the Banner of Heaven gave me serious pause mainly due to the length of each episode. Many limited series episode can run from anywhere to forty minutes to an hour, some run over that. But the shortest episode of Heaven clocked in an hour and a five minutes. That seemed like a really big investment of time, particularly for a series that involved a series of killings among fundamentalism Mormons in the 1980s. I decided to wait and see for the Emmy nominations before getting involved. When the Emmys essentially chose to ignore the series that month (Garfield would be the sole nominee) I was relieved and went on with my business.

I might have never watched the series at all had not a series of events intervened. The first, of course, has been the labor stoppage in Hollywood.  More importantly this spring FX began to rerun in the fall of 2022 several series that it aired in conjunction with Hulu.  Some like Reservation Dogs I had already seen, some I have started but not finished, such as The Patient and one of the others was Under the Banner of Heaven.  I figured since it was there I’d record it and watch it at my leisure. That period went from May until last week.

Well having seen it, I think the Emmys made the right call by choosing not to nominate it for Best Limited Series. I’m not saying that it was necessarily better than Pam & Tommy or Inventing Anna, which I have no intention watching but there were several other limited series from that period, such as Women of The Movement and Maid that were clearly superior both in terms of writing and acting. Now does that mean Under the Banner of Heaven has no artistic merit and no value in watching? It clearly does have some of both. But in order to appreciate both requires a sufficient investment of time and energy, much of which the average viewer does not have in abundance. It also doesn’t help matters that the  series not entirely tenable with the idea of binge-watching and I don’t just mean the eight hour investment. I also mean that the average episode of this series will involve a lot of work by the viewer, work that even someone as used to this kind of TV found difficult to put in. The narrative is complex to say the least, because there are so many flashbacks and they follow such a pattern that it took a lot of work for me to keep up with the story. Dustin Lance Black is a superb writer but for the much of the first half of the series and quite a bit beyond it, the narrative tends to wander to the point that it is difficult to tell when and where the story is taking place. It shocked me when the series ended to learn that the investigation at the center of the series had taken place over little more than two weeks. It felt like it had been going on for years.

At the center of the series is Detective Jeb Pyre (Garfield) a devout Mormon with a happy marriage and two daughters. His mother is going through mental deterioration, and his daughter is on the verge of giving her testimony.  The critical figure in the family is his wife Rebecca, played by Adelaide Clemens in a role not far removed from her work in Rectify. Much of the strength in the series is in the Pyre family drama but the series wanders from it quite a bit.

Detective Pyre is called into a double homicide. A wife and her infant daughter have been brutally murdered. The wife is Brenda Lafferty and though we only see her in flashbacks Daisy Edgar-Jones does much to make her register. Her husband Allen (Billy Howle) is found a few blocks away covered in blood.  Both Pyre and his new partner Bill Taba, a Utah Indian (Gil Birmingham) think it will be easy to elicit a confession.

As they interview Allen, he rants that his family is being erased and that ‘men with beards’ are overtaking them. Taba thinks that Allen has gone mad but Pyre wants to tread carefully. The Lafferty family is a big name in both Utah and LDS and he thinks they will have dot all there I’s and cross their T’s.

Allen then proceeds to tell the story of how he and Brenda, also a Mormon but from Montana met and courted. Brenda was more oriented towards her career, not thought of much for women in the 1970s much less Mormon women, but Allen was supportive. He introduces her to his family and becomes clear almost from the start that he sees them as snakes. Of particular danger are his older brothers Ron (Sam Worthington) and Dan (Russell). Brenda tends to move more towards their wives Dianna and Matilda.

Never outright discussed in the series but on full display is just how much of a monster the family patriarch is. He openly beats his adult sons in public and its clear that its been going on throughout their childhood. The father’s decision to go on a mission with his wife leads to Ron being made the patriarch over Dan. This leads to an internal conflict that takes over the entire family.

Many of the problems that viewers might have with the series is trying to determine what happens to first Dan and then Ron. Their behavior very quickly takes on a break from reality in which they see themselves as first touched by God, received messages of the prophet and essentially being called upon to take on the oath of the church. The series spends a significant amount of time dwelling on the Lafferty’s family decision to research the origins of LDS starting with Joseph Smith, his relationship with his wife Mary and the conflict he had with Brigham Young. (I’ll get to that in a moment because that’s one of the larger issues I have with the show.) Allen apparently spent too much of his time falling under the aura of his brothers even as they became more detached from reality, with both of them first being excommunicated from the church and then forming their own far more fundamentalist sect. They clearly want to get back to the roots of LDS, which initially begins with ignoring the laws of the state in regard to taxation, trying to form their own segment of government and eventually embracing polygamy. This is particularly devastating for Dan’s wife Dianna when it becomes clear that Dan thinks the scripture has called upon him to marry his stepdaughters.  She gets them to safety at the cost of her freedom.

The series never goes so far as to call anything that Ron and Dan do an act of insanity even though that is how it will no doubt appear to the average viewer. I think Black, who is openly gay was drawn to this story for that very reason. Almost every action that the Lafferty clan undertake would be considered insane to anyone else and should have been met with some kind of intervention countless times before blood ended up being shed. But because the Lafferty family were Mormon – and one of the fundamental principles of Mormonism is complete devotion to one’s spouse no matter the cost – their actions were not only tolerated but basically ignored. In the penultimate episode Brenda makes a last ditch effort to save herself by appealing to the church elders to grant her a divorce from her husband. Not only do they refuse to do so, they tell her that it is her sacred duty to make sure the Lafferty family sees the light. This path essentially seals her fate because by this point the sons have already committed murder and are more than willing to shed blood.

When the story sticks to the madness of the Lafferty family and the struggles as Brenda and the women get out from under it, it is on firm ground. The problem is Heaven spends far too much time telling both the creationist story of Mormonism to the viewer in flashback and how it was based on a pack of lies that the church has used to base its foundation. This very quickly becomes tiresome to the point that you genuinely wonder why Black thought we needed to keep going through it over and over. There’s a tangential point to it – the narrative of this story is being told to Pyre and the more he learns, the more he begins to lose his lifelong faith.  But it starts to drag as early as the second episode and I quickly found myself becoming bored. I imagine the viewer will find the same.

Indeed, I think Black and his writers seem so determined to write and expose on the fundamental lies of Mormonism that they add at least five to ten minutes an episode making the same point.  It’s clear by the end of the series that Pyre has realized the importance of this – that everything that he has heard has fundamentally led the Lafferty’s and their followers to embrace the darkest impulses of the church and cause them to defame and punish women. But it’s a point that has become crystal clear well before that, and you’d think that Pyre as a policeman would know better.  Indeed, in the final episode when he confronts the head of the church who wants him off the case about the fact that a scoutmaster was abusing children and he was called off the investigation that he knows this first hand. A scene where he has an argument with his still devout wife shows he knows things are bad – he asks her if he knows the things their eldest daughter writes about their journal. But that too seems tiresome in the face of everything we see.

Garfield manages to carry most of the weight of the series well, which I confess is a surprise to me.  Garfield is a truly gifted actor; his work in such films as The Social Network, Never Let Me Go and Hacksaw Ridge more than prove that. But he also has the habit of sometimes going to far into over the top, such as in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. He handles the struggles of Pyre throughout the investigation and his loss of faith. That said, I don’t think I would have been able to make it through the entire series without the work of two more solid performances, those of Edgar-Jones and Birmingham.

Edgar-Jones was no doubt robbed of an Emmy nomination because of the overwhelming love for The White Lotus: her work is clearly superior to that of Alexandra Daddario or Sydney Sweeney in this case. Brenda spends much of the series watching her family devolve into madness, trying desperately to save her husband from the mire his brothers are dragging him into. When the church refuses to grant her a divorce and orders her to stay, she could have collapsed into defeat but rather chose to see at as a challenge, not to help the brothers but their wives. And so she eventually helps Dianna escape to Florida, which leaves Ron without anchor and officially signs her death warrant. In her final scene (doubtless written for dramatic purposes) she faces her death with remarkable calmness and makes it very clear what the brothers are. Dianne can not know of those words but in her actions in the series finale, it’s clear she has been inspired by her sister-in-law’s boldness.

Birmingham is remarkable throughout. As the only outsider in the world of Utah, he is inclined to dismiss much of what happens around him as nonsense. However, he spends most of the series focused on the investigation and deferring to Pyre even though he clearly has problems with what he’s hearing and little use for the religious dogma which he considers nonsense. It is not until the finale that he reveals his true opinion of everything he has heard in two extraordinary scenes.

In the first he is searching for the weapon that killed Brenda in the middle of the desert. They have been given this lead by two colleagues of the Lafferty’s who are essentially atheists. By this point Pyre has given over the despair and tells Taba as a Mormon he was taught that atheists are evil. Taba then gives in a level tone a speech in which he demolishes the myths of his church. Earlier in the episode, a Mormon elder has talked to Taba by acknowledging their alliance in an 1858 incident when Mormons and Indians united to drive off the Gentiles. Taba tells him he learned a different story. Looking for the weapon, Taba tells Pyre his version of the story in which it is made clear that this was a massacre done entirely by Mormons, that the Indians were told if they didn’t participated they would be massacred – and then chose to ride off anyway.  At the end of the speech Taba, who all this time has been calmly searching the ground finds the weapons right where they were left.

The other speech comes a few scenes later where Pyre is paralyzed by doubt. Taba drives off the road, gets out of the car and walks towards the landscape. Pyre follows him, demanding answers and finally curses for the first time in the series. Pyre then turns around and then tells him the story of how he keeps hearing that it’s a miracle about the beauty of the landscape. “What if God had nothing to do with it?” he asks Pyre. “Does that make it any less a miracle?” For the first time he lectures Pyre on his faith and tells him that he doesn’t believe anything he’s heard but these delusions may be the only way to stop the killers. So he demands to know what Pyre thinks they’re thinking. Pyre clears his head and in the least likely way possible realizes where the Lafferty brothers are.

I won’t say that there aren’t great strengths to Under the Banner of Heaven ­– along with the level of many of the performances, the series is beautifully shot and takes full advantage of the Western landscape. Yet I had the feeling watching the series that didn’t fit with many of other limited series I have loved, certainly not like Dopesick or The Dropout. With the latter two, I thought I was watching the kind of epic story that a Spielberg would tell. With Under The Banner of Heaven, I was inclined to think this was the work of Terence Malick – beautifully shot and directed, but not necessarily with a linear story.  Malick has his admirers to be sure, but I don’t think a true crime story is one that he’s well suited for. This is a well done show but I would have preferred the Spielberg version.

My score: 3.75 stars.