Series takes questions about Mormonism off shelf
‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ framed as detective story
Dustin Lance Black first picked up a copy of “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” nearly two decades ago. For someone who was raised in a conservative Mormon household but had since left the faith, it still felt dangerous.
“The church I grew up in encourages members not to dig into the past, to doubt one’s doubts, to put your questions on a shelf,” said Black.
Jon Krakauer’s propulsive nonfiction bestseller uses a horrific double murder committed by fundamentalist Mormon brothers in 1984 to explore the turbulent history of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its renunciation of plural marriage in 1890 and the origins of radical polygamist sects in which child sexual abuse is widespread.
When “Under the
Banner of Heaven” was published in 2003, the Mormon Church issued a full-throated denunciation of the book, calling it “not only a slap in the face of modern Latter-day Saints, but also a misunderstanding of religion in general.”
But to Black, it was a revelation: “I was sometimes angry that so much about my own faith had been withheld from me, but I was also heartened that I wasn’t insane, that my doubts were legitimate,” says the Oscar-winning “Milk” screenwriter, who grew alienated from the church as a teenager because of how it handled his mother’s physically abusive marriage. “I didn’t understand why it should be life and death to believe.”
Similar themes animate Black’s TV adaptation of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” now streaming
on Hulu, which re-imagines Krakauer’s book as a gripping detective story that asks provocative questions about the nature of faith and the dark side of religious fervor. Though largely sympathetic in its portrayal of mainstream Mormons, it is also unflinching in depicting the church’s bloody legacy.
The long-gestating series — produced by FX and originally planned as a feature to be directed by Ron Howard — follows police officers Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) and Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham) as they investigate the ritualistic murder of a young Mormon mother, Brenda Lafferty (Daisy EdgarJones), and her infant daughter, Erica, in a sleepy corner of suburban Utah. The detectives initially suspect Brenda’s husband, Allen (Billy Howle), of the crime, but soon learn that
his brothers Dan and Ron (Wyatt Russell and Sam Worthington), once-exemplary mainstream church members, have descended into bellicose fundamentalism. As they uncover the truth behind the gruesome slaying, the series flashes back to violent moments in LDS history, including the murder of founder Joseph Smith in 1844, inviting viewers to draw connections between the timelines.
Krakauer, who’d seen his book “Into Thin Air” made into “a really bad TV movie,” was initially wary of allowing anyone to option “Under the Banner of Heaven.” But his niece, filmmaker Shannon Costello, urged him to return the numerous phone calls he’d received from Imagine Entertainment.
Executive producer Brian Grazer says he was drawn to the book because
it was at once a “riveting thriller and a cautionary tale about the dangers of fundamentalism.” He and Howard considered just one writer for the adaptation: Black, who had worked with Grazer on the biopic “J. Edgar” and written for “Big Love,” the HBO drama about a polygamist family in Salt Lake City. Krakauer, too, was won over by Black’s vision, and agreed to sell the rights to his book.
“I didn’t want to just be a true crime, grisly murder thing. The larger issues about fundamentalist faith — and the hazards thereof — are really important to me,” says Krakauer, who is credited as a consultant on the series.
But by his own account, Black struggled to capture the sweeping scope of the book in a two-hour feature. The project went dormant for a few years, then the
team at Imagine decided to revisit it as a limited series.
“Long-form was the right way to crack a fascinating, tragic family story,” says Howard, an executive producer on the series.
A breakthrough came when Black devised the fictional detectives who serve as audience proxies and lend the story an element of suspense. “Without the investigative tool, it felt academic,” he says. “And I didn’t want it to feel academic.”
Taba is a member of the Paiute tribe, which lived in Utah well before the arrival of LDS pilgrims in the 19th century, making him “local yet an outsider,” says Black. Pyre, meanwhile, is a rankand-file church member and family man who finds he is no longer able to “keep his questions on a shelf,” to use an adage repeated throughout the series, as he tries to understand what drove the Lafferty brothers to commit an act of “blood atonement.”
“Because of the simple fact that he needs to do his job, he has to face all of the deeper truths about his faith, and it’s really incredibly painful,” says Garfield, who was intrigued by the specific challenges of being a Latter-day Saint detective: “How do you interrogate someone when you’re conditioned to be patient, kind and gentle all the time? How do you interrogate a fellow Mormon, a person that you see as a part of your extended family?”
Garfield leaned heavily on Black to field his spiritual questions and found “there was a strange kind of love there for the faith,” he says.
To prep key cast and crew, Black created a massive Dropbox folder filed with photos, videos and documents. He gave books like “No Man Knows My History,” an influential scholarly biography of Joseph Smith by Fawn Brodie, to the actors playing historical figures.
And he sent Garfield and other cast members to Utah before production started last year because, he says, “There’s no book that’s going to take the place of meeting Mormons.”
“I’m sure the Mormon Church will still find fault here and there. That is their job. But I wanted to make that job very difficult for them,” Black says. “I stand behind the show in terms of how it depicts Mormonism — and not just Mormonism but, frankly, Christianity in America.”
And though he believes he has adequately distinguished between fundamentalist Mormons and mainstream Mormons, Black adds, “I also have been honest about the fact that they share a lot in common, and that many of the things they share in common are misogynistic, dangerous and potentially deadly.”