Under the Banner of Heaven review New York Times

The author Jon Krakauer’s sweeping 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith could be called, in today’s vernacular, true crime+. It is both a look into a particular murder—that of a young Mormon woman and her daughter, at the hands of her brothers-in-law—and a survey of the Mormon church’s entire troubled, sensational history. It’s compelling and frightfully enlightening on both fronts, a towering achievement of reportage, analysis, and good old fashioned storytelling.

Given its scope and heft, the book would seem pretty much unadaptable for the screen. And yet, here is a new six-episode series, Under the Banner of Heaven (FX, April 28), trying to do just that. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black—who grew up in the Mormon church—has taken a crack at the material, a long gestating labor of love that yields fitful results. 

Black has decided to invent a detective character, devout Mormon Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), to guide us through the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her daughter, Erica. Through his eyes, ever widening in alarm, we are introduced to the Lafferty clan—a tangle of prideful, striving brothers—and the fundamentalism that ensnared several of them. To Pyre, this all comes as a shock. To us—who may have read Krakauer’s book, or watched HBO’s Big Love, or osmosed the story of Mormon fundamentalist leader Warren Jeffs from myriad reports about his horrid misdeeds—what Pyre discovers is all too grimly familiar. 

At first it seems that the series has wisely eschewed the history lesson aspect of the book and instead pared the narrative down to just this one discrete, terrible event. But gradually, the show begins weaving in flashbacks to the church’s early days, when Joseph Smith (Andrew Burnap) was a young pariah persecuted for his transgressions against mainstream Christianity. This brings Under the Banner of Heaven’s timeline count to (at least) three, giving a stutter to the show’s fluid cadence. 

The show gets more scattered as it goes, having trouble juggling (and distinguishing) its array of characters. We watch with dread as Brenda is brought into the Lafferty fold, welcomed warmly at first but then pushed further to the margins as her brothers-in-law radicalize. Dan Lafferty (Wyatt Russell) is the erratic, hard-charging Libertarian force of the family, inveighing against government taxation and turning to the atavistic codes of the old Mormon church—specifically relating to plural marriage and the subservience of women—for divine confirmation of his extremism. His older brother, Ron (Sam Worthington), is a more run-of-the-mill asshole, cruel to his concerned wife, Dianna (Denise Gough), and angry at his mean old bastard of a father, who favors Dan over Ron. 

There are other brothers, blending together into a soup of male entitlement. The youngest Lafferty, Allen (Billy Howle), is an outlier: He’s Brenda’s husband, and at least meekly supports her career ambitions. That puts him in stark contrast to the rest of the men in his family, who cast a disapproving eye on what they view as Brenda’s womanly violations.

The curdling of the Lafferty family is told in flashbacks prompted by Pyre’s present-tense interrogations. It should be easy enough to delineate what is happening when, given that Brenda is dead in one timeline. But there is a blur in the way the series is stitched together. What we’re supposed to be getting, I think, is an impressionistic picture of a family dynamic headed toward ruin, of the inexorable build toward Brenda’s murder. But that sense of momentum is too often disrupted by a switch in time, and by a shoehorning in of Pyre’s personal struggles, meant to round out a character who may not have needed it.

And, of course, there is the olden-days stuff, which adds no real thematic value to the series. Characters could just as easily discuss their faith’s violent past without us having to see the period-piece reenactments. In trying to mimic the bigness of the book, Under the Banner of Heaven becomes unwieldy. 

The series is, at least, anchored by solid performances. Much of the cast is British or Australian, which leads to some wobbly accent work—and the sneaking feeling that this is all a bit of dark tourism for non-Americans curious about our unique squalor. But otherwise, the ensemble gives the show its vital texture. Russell is a particular standout, warping his son-of-Goldie glow into a dangerous magnetism. He’s the most frightening part of the series—for good reason—though he does not let Dan slip into easy villainy. 

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More than once in FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven, characters with troubling or inconvenient questions are told to “set them on the shelf” — to shove them aside and look instead to the guidance of the God-given authorities above them, be they husbands for wives, parents for children or Mormon church leaders for congregants. And over and over, they find that they can’t. Their questions have a way of haunting them, of keeping them up at night, of nudging them toward strange, thorny, even horrific roads.

Under the Banner of Heaven (which will stream on Hulu) asks some very hard questions of its own, starting as a gripping murder mystery set in a seemingly pious, quiet Mormon community. But it’s the series’ insistence on asking not just who did it but why, why and why again that turns it into something bigger — something more complex, more thoughtful and ultimately far more unsettling.

Like the true-crime bestseller by Jon Krakauer that it’s based on, Under the Banner of Heaven connects two stories separated by over a century. One traces the tragedy of Brenda Wright Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a woman who had married into a prominent Utah Mormon family, and who was found murdered along with her infant daughter in 1984. The other is a chronicle of the early Mormon church that stretches back to its founding by Joseph Smith (Andrew Burnap) in the 1820s, but that places its emphasis less on divine inspiration than human sin and struggle.

For the miniseries adaptation, creator Dustin Lance Black (Milk) adds a third: that of Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), a fictional Mormon cop investigating Brenda’s murder. It’s to Jeb and his non-Mormon partner, Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham), that the first two stories are gradually revealed, in flashbacks prompted by intense but discursive conversations with suspects like Brenda’s husband Allen Lafferty (Billy Howle). If Jeb never totally stops feeling like the framing device that he is, despite attempts to flesh out his personal life with family troubles and a crisis of faith, Garfield’s limpid performance still makes him easy to sympathize with.

From the start, Under the Banner of Heaven demonstrates a quiet confidence. Brenda’s death supplies the narrative suspense, but it’s the show’s sense of empathy that proves truly difficult to shake. David Mackenzie, who directed the first two episodes, establishes a handheld style that pulls the viewer into the screen, so present we can almost smell the grassy lawns of Jeb’s carefully manicured suburban world. Meanwhile, Black’s personality-driven dialogue illuminates the intricate web of relationships between its dozen regular characters more efficiently and effectively than paragraphs of dry exposition could.

Sometimes, the series’ compassion takes the form of restraint. When Jeb is first called to Brenda’s home, her dead body is shown only briefly and from a distance — never clearly enough to make out any real detail — and her baby’s is not shown at all. Instead, it rests on Jeb’s reactions, which cycle in rapid succession through tears, nausea and near panic, to convey the horror of what he’s witnessed. In eschewing the lingering, graphic shots so common to the crime genre, the series also avoids the trap of ogling the same violence it claims to decry.

The choice allows Under the Banner of Heaven to keep its focus on who Brenda was in her life, and why and how certain forces converged to end it, rather than on the sensationalistic details of her death. Flashbacks paint a vivid picture of a bright, deeply devout young woman who’d drop everything to help a Mormon sister reconnect with God or protect her own struggling husband — and, concurrently, of the men around her who demanded meek subservience instead, including Allen’s warring brothers Ron (Sam Worthington) and Dan (Wyatt Russell, working in a vein reminiscent of his unsettling turn in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

It takes a little more time for the relevance of the series’ third throughline to reveal itself. When Allen first brings up Joseph Smith during questioning near the end of the first episode, it’s mostly Howle’s performance — so raw it’s almost hard to watch — that sells it as anything but a bizarre deflection tactic. The awkwardness hasn’t entirely dissipated by the second or third (of the five sent to THR for review, and of seven total for the series), but a grander design has started to emerge. Trace back the roots of Brenda’s murder far enough, and they lead directly to the very foundations of a faith whose unwavering conviction in its own righteousness started to overwhelm its tolerance for doubt, imperfection or honest self-reflection.

Certainly, such shadows lurk in the histories of any belief system that’s survived long enough to attract a following. For example, the series makes clear that the history of the Latter-day Saints is inextricable from the history of America, which frequently met them with violent persecution. And Under the Banner of Heaven does take care to show that Mormons are no monolith; Brenda, in particular, comes to represent a more considered, progressive approach to the faith that brings her clarity of purpose while still allowing for evolution and personal agency.

But Under the Banner of Heaven draws power from its specificity, surely informed by Black’s own upbringing in the Mormon church. Though Bill occasionally makes for a convenient excuse for other characters (all Mormons) to explain certain terms or traditions, the series lets many more details of everyday life pass without comment. Mormonism and Mormon culture is for these characters what water is for a fish — just as unremarkable, and just as essential. It’s little wonder they’re so terrified to ask whether some of it might be toxic. And yet, what threatens to drown them in the end are not the questions, but the unbending refusal to engage with doubt at all.