TV: Under the Banner of Heaven (2022)
Episodes 1-3; Episodes 4-7 begin streaming on Thurs., May 12
Gil Birmingham and Andrew Garfield are Utah detectives probing a horrific murder
Under the Banner of Heaven (2022)
Now streaming on Hulu, FX and Disney+
In its opening pages, Jon Krakauer's 2003 non-fiction bestseller Under the Banner of Heaven recounts a true crime. In American Fork, Utah on July 24, 1984, a young Mormon mother, Brenda Lafferty, and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, were murdered, their bodies savaged with multiple stab wounds. Brenda had been raised in Idaho as a believer in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), so the brutal dispatch of mother and daughter shocked Utah’s Mormon community.
Krakauer didn’t tease his readers into guessing who did the foul deed. He quickly named the killers. He focused instead on what had driven them to commit such a heinous act, and how the LDS’s pious, stormy history might have figured in the slayings.
Dustin Lance Black, creator and head writer of the adaptation Under the Banner of Heaven (a limited series now streaming on Hulu, FX and Disney+), has reversed Krakauer's priorities. Black, an Oscar winner for his screenplay of Milk (2008), grew up as a Mormon (he’s since left the church). This may be why his detailed depictions here of Mormon fundamentalism feel authentic. But unlike the scholarly Krakauer, in the three episodes of the series that have aired to date, Black structures the tale like a classic police procedural. With, to be sure, an extremist fundamentalist twist.
He’s created a fictional lead investigator, Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), a devout Mormon who comes to question his faith when he’s exposed to some of its bizarre extremists, men capable of murder. Nettling and challenging Pyre is another invented character, his partner, Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham). He's a veteran detective newly arrived from Las Vegas and a proud Native American who has no truck with Mormon theology and little patience with Pyre’s attempts to trace the motive for the killings back to Mormon orthodoxy. Taba just wants the killers found and jailed, with a jury left to decide what was stirring in their addled brains when they wielded knives to slice up two innocent people.
But as his unquestioned devotion to Mormonism begins to crumble, Pyre can’t let the case simply rely on the routine gathering of evidence. For one thing, the chief suspect, Brenda’s husband Allen (an intense Billy Howles), won’t let him. Allen, a much more fulminant believer than Pyre, insists he’s innocent and tells Pyre to look into the entire, sprawling Lafferty clan to find the killers and their motive.
In flashback, we learn that when Allen married Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones), he knew she wanted to do what was unthinkable for a Mormon wife: take a job outside the community. Brenda meant to become a television news journalist. She’d gotten a communications degree from Brigham Young University, so her professional hopes were no pipedream. Still, the hidebound Lafferty flock wouldn’t hear of a Mormon wife going her own way, so Brenda set her hopes aside.
Allen (Billy Howles) and Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones) greeting the Lafferty family
But the decision rankled with her, because unlike other Mormon traditionalists, the Laffertys were outliers, devotees of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), an offshoot denounced as fanatical by traditional Mormons. FLDS believers freely practiced polygamy, refused to pay fines, evaded all taxes and, in the most shocking deviation of all, covertly subscribed to a necessary cleansing for past sins called blood atonement. Could this last tenet, Pyre slowly comes to wonder, have been what sealed the fates of Brenda and her young daughter?
The Laffertys, he learns, thrived on extremes. Their rise to prominence (they were even called “The Kennedys of Utah”) had been assured by the family’s domineering, fervently righteous patriarch Ammon (a scary Christopher Heyerdahl), now looking to turn over the managing of the family's fortunes to his sons. Ammon didn’t hesitate to take a belt to one of his disobedient sons in full view of the family. So, Allen saw no way to go against the clan. He convinced an unwilling Brenda to defer her career dreams. But Brenda never ceased questioning the family’s inflexible “traditions” and always insisted on her right, though she was a woman, to criticize both family and church. That insistence may have been a demand too much for the Laffertys.
Andrew Garfield explores the devout, troubled Mormon detective Jeb Pyre
Garfield’s performance moors the series’ shifting points of view, with the Laffertys shown as stubborn ideologues and the desperate Allen trying to reveal their true, dark nature. Pyre is both a vigilant seeker of facts, and a troubled man trying to discover where his faith may have been overtaken by blind practice, performing hollow rituals that he thought held his life’s meaning. Garfield is astonishingly sensitive in the role yet can turn in an instant to the dogged cop on the hunt, not buying any of the Laffertys’ trickery. And he can also close the door to his office and kneel to pray when he’s overcome with spiritual doubt.
Garfield is ably supported by Birmingham, who gives Detective Taba not only a wry sarcasm when confronting Mormon pieties, but a loyal partner’s wish to get to the truth in order to ease the fraying Prye’s pain. He uses his outsider status, including his dark brown skin, as a wedge to shove between the lies the Laffertys are telling. He openly mocks their claims of innocence and refuses to let Pyre allow religious unity to stop him from facing raw facts.
The third outstanding performer is Edgar-Jones’ as Brenda. As radiant here as she was manic and inward turning in the TV series Normal People (2020), Jones brings liveliness, contrariness and wit to the role of Brenda, all of which make the murder of the young wife and mother feel so crushing. Jones’ vibrant performance makes Pyre’s unease all the more vivid. His own wife and two daughters begin to seem more vulnerable, and precious, as Brenda’s grim end continues to haunt him.
The series spends some not very rewarding time flashing back to the history of Joseph Smith and his wife Emma, as well as that of Brigham Young, the leader who completed the founding of the Mormon Church. The Smith-Young struggle to give Mormonism legitimacy also brings out a violent streak in the faithful. When attacked, Smith responds with even more piety, but also forgiveness. Young, bolder, is unafraid of wielding a literal sword, and this penchant for eye-for-an-eye retribution gets blended into the Mormon legacy. But at least through the three episodes aired so far, this aspect of the story doesn’t do much to illuminate the modern story. In the final four episodes it may resonate more clearly.
With the first two episodes directed by the agile David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, 2016) and the third by Courtney Hunt (TV’s visually stunning Barkskins, 2020), the series has a high lonesome look that makes the story feel properly stark. Clean mountain air gives a sense of breathing room throughout, even when the characters are confined to a police station or enacting rigid church rituals. The wide-open skies always seem to beckon as a space either to be anointed in God’s love, or to accept, fully, His wrath.
“Our faith breeds dangerous men,” Jeb is told. The Laffertys are a kind of force field, cold to the touch. The LDS is another force field, warm but not entirely trustworthy. The demands of the law form a third force field, where facts can’t always outrun passions. Those collisions make this series worth watching. There’s really no one to root for. You watch from a distance, mesmerized, horrified, where so much of the time good and evil seem astoundingly evenly matched.