‘Pure’ gets too messy to remain unspoiled
“Pure” isn’t. In fact, the Canadian import premiering Friday, July 7, on Hulu is a watchable mess.
The series is about drugs, violence and Mennonites in Southern Ontario. Created by Michael Amo, “Pure” is about an upstanding citizen who gets tied up in the illegal drug trade and finds his moral compass set spinning by what happens to him.
His name is not Walter White, and he is not a high school chemistry teacher. He is Noah Funk (Ryan Robbins), a Mennonite pastor with two teenage children and a bonnet-wearing wife who gets drawn into the drug business herself.
This is what should be called “kitchen sink drama,” but not in the traditional definition of the term. In this case, it’s because Amo has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into the story line, apparently in the belief that if you overstuff the plot, your audience won’t notice that there’s very little there there.
The basic concept, if you can find it, had potential. A group of God-fearing Mennonites in the town of Antioch, Ohio, find themselves torn asunder by an offshoot gang headed by Eli Voss (Peter Outerbridge), who is working with another group of fallen Mennonites in Mexico to import large amounts of drugs into Canada. Through
a flimsy plot twist that feels completely manufactured, Funk joins Voss’ gang to protect the life of a young boy.
Other plot strings include a prodigal brother of Noah’s named Abel (Gord Rand) who is an outcast among the Mennonites because he’s had a drug habit; Noah’s daughter Tina (Jessica Clement), who is struggling with wanting to be a “normal” teenager; and Noah’s son, Isaac (Dylan Everett), who adheres so strictly to the tenets of his religion that he wants to be baptized earlier than most sect members.
Amo creates a rule-breaking local cop named Bronco Novak (A.J. Buckley) to act as a kind of mirror image of Noah. We meet Novak as he’s saying goodbye to a hooker in a cheap motel, which of course saves Amo time in establishing Novak’s character. But as morally bankrupt as he is, he has decent cop instincts and as Noah becomes more immersed in the dark side, Novak becomes more righteous as he collaborates with a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Texas named Phoebe O’Reilly (Rosie Perez) to stop the secret drug transport scheme.
Several performances are very good, and there are flashes of credibility and empathetic character construction. But mostly what keeps “Pure” from realizing its potential, beyond the overcrowded construct, is that to even come close to Vince Gilligan’s complex moral scheme for “Breaking Bad,” it is necessary to build delicately nuanced characters. Walter White had seeds of his future in his character from the beginning. Noah Funk and, for that matter, his wife Anna (Alex Paxton-Beesley), are morally monochromatic characters, who out of nowhere do things and make decisions without credible foundation. Everything thereafter is bound to wobble when the foundation is that weak.