I decided to watch "Under the Banner of Heaven" because it was billed as a detective show starring Andrew Garfield. I didn't give the Mormon content much thought, and wasn't anticipating how central to the seven-episode miniseries the exploration of LDS and FLDS culture would be. The show's creator, however, is Dustin Lance Black, who grew up in a Mormon household, and clearly has taken pains to put a more authentic portrayal of Mormon communities onscreen. "Under the Banner of Heaven" dramatizes the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her baby, which is being investigated by Salt Lake City police detectives Jeb Pyre (Garfield) and his partner Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham). Pyre is LDS, and Bill is a Paiute Indian.
The two detectives are fictional, but Brenda and the particulars of her murder and very real and very disturbing. Her husband Allen (Billy Howle) is arrested first, and through him we learn about the Lafferty family, a set of brothers who became increasingly fundamentalist as their fortunes soured. The two oldest, Ron (Sam Worthington) and Dan (Wyatt Russell) were obsessed with the history of the LDS church and their own self-importance, eventually becoming abusive to their wives, Matilda (Chloe Pirre) and Dianna (Denise Gough), and threatening to Brenda, who they viewed as a threat for her worldly behavior. Pyre is forced to confront his own relationship to the church as the investigation goes on, and the role of the Laffertys' faith and the failures of the LDS hierarchy become clear.
"Under the Banner of Heaven" works better as a character drama than it does as a detective story. The performances are all very good, and several of the individual storylines are very compelling. Watching Brenda try to retain her independence as her life gets swallowed up by the restrictive Mormon dogma is heartbreaking. Pyre's struggle against doubt is given the appropriate gravity and sincerity. I'll single out Wyatt Russell as the best performer of the cast here, as he makes Dan Lafferty absolutely terrifying. However, as a mystery the show is unwieldy and tends to leave a lot of unanswered questions. There are characters who seem to become fanatics out of nowhere, or suddenly just drop out of the narrative. There are multiple interludes where we follow LDS founder Joseph Smith (Andrew Burnap) and his wife Emma (Tyner Rushing), meant to show the church has been linked to violence and horror since the beginning. However, these historical segments are too long and too many, stretching out a narrative that already feels too long. By the time the feature-length finale rolls around, it all feels a bit anticlimactic.
Let's move on to something completely different. "Pistol" is a Danny Boyle's blank check project, a six-part dramatization of the history of the punk rock band, Sex Pistols. The band was well before my time, so I only knew parts of their story, mostly related to the sad tale of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. "Pistol" is told from the POV of the band's founder, guitarist Steve Jones (Toby Wallace). Initially Steve, guitarist Wally Nightingale (Dylan Llewellyn), drummer Paul Cook (Jacob Slater), and bassist Glen Matlock (Christian Lees) form a band called The Swankers. However, they catch the attention of would-be impresario Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who becomes their manager, puts Steven on guitar, and fires Wally in favor of singer John Lydon (Anson Boon) - soon to be known as Johnny Rotten. The most creative license involves Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), who is installed as Jones' girlfriend, and treated as a main character. Other feminine influences on the band come in the form of McLaren's partner Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), and shopgirl/model Jordan (Maisie Williams). Chrissie and Jordan work at McLaren and Westwood's boutique, SEX, which serves as a base of operations in the early episodes.
"Pistol" works well as a miniseries, allowing each episode to focus on different challenges faced by the band, and different periods in their development. Simply getting the Sex Pistols together takes two episodes, and it's only in the third that they start coming up with memorable music. The Sid (Louis Partridge) and Nancy (Emma Appleton) relationship is at the center of the fifth. Boyle directed every installment, using archival footage and a well curated soundtrack to immerse the viewer in the UK of the 70s. I think it's worth checking out the first episode for the playlist alone. Knowing very little about the Sex Pistols, I find it fascinating that the band knew they were mediocre musicians from the start, but their power was in their counterculture image and their rebel nature, which McLaren gleefully cultivated. There's some stretching of the truth and some burnishing of their legends, but Boyle is happy to portray the Pistols as a group of deeply troubled, constantly fighting, wildly irresponsible reprobates, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to embody the rage of their generation.
And it's all very entertaining, more or less. As a biopic, I had some mixed reactions to "Pistol," but came away mostly positive on the series. The actors are good, especially newcomer Anson Boon as a very memorable Johnny Rotten. There's the usual glorification of bad behavior, and shamelessly invented devices like a woman named Pauline (Bianca Stephens), the subject of the song "Bodies," but the execution is very good. It helps that Boyle is really using the band's story to pay homage to the whole punk era, and pays a lot of attention to getting the right amount of cultural context and period detail onscreen to make the narrative accessible for newcomers. And I suspect that for a certain crowd, the nostalgia will be off the charts.
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