Lifetime movies aren’t exactly known for nuance. Most of the time, they examine tabloidy topics in a tabloidy way, concentrating on the more sensationalistic aspects of the story. A new two-part movie based on one woman’s recollection of being a wife of Ervil LeBaron, “The Mormon Manson,” could have used a bit less sensationalism and more nuance.
Opening Shot: We see fleeting scenes of the life of Rena Chynoweth (Felicity Huffman) as she listens to music on earbuds. She’s working the garden in her backyard when her husband comes out to tell her about something in the news.
The Gist: The news that Rena’s husband shows her is about an attack on LeBaron family members in Sonora, Mexico. The members of the LeBaron family were part of a cultish offshoot of the Mormon church who decamped to Mexico decades earlier to practice polygamy. The news sends Rena reeling, but she goes in a panic mode when someone shows up at her door.
The person at the door turns out to be Josie Ortez (Jessie Fraser), a reporter for a Houston paper, who wants to ask Rena about “The Mormon Manson,” Ervil LeBaron (Eric Johnson). Rena is very reluctant, but relents when Josie tells her that she knows that Rena is one of the few people who escaped that violent family, one that Josie and her mom encountered many times back in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Rena starts telling her story, starting from when the LeBarons recruited their family to join their Mormon offshoot in 1967, and when the entire group moved to Chihuahua two years later. The group believed in polygamy, and when Rena was a teenager (Olga Petsa), her sister Thelma (Michelle Harrison) had long been Ervil’s fifth wife. Ervil’s methods of recruiting potential wives for the men ran afoul of his older brother Joel (Adrian Petriw), who was the sect’s leader. Ervil eventually split off and formed the Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God.
One of the things Ervil believed in was “blood atonement,” which means that killing people who opposed him — even ones in his own sect, or his brother Joel — would mean their souls would be “freed.” He recruited members of his sect, including his wives, to do the dirty work for him. Rena was also roped into killing duty after she reluctantly became Ervil’s 13th wife.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The 13th Wife is like Big Love, but with a lot more violence.
Our Take: Written by Anne-Marie Hess and directed by Michael Nankin, The 13th Wife: Escaping Polygamy feels like it started life as a movie about Ervil LeBaron and young Rena Chynoweth and how Ervil recruited his wives and followers to kill dissenters and then, when Felicity Huffman signed onto the project, the older Rena’s recollections of being in the LeBaron family were grafted onto it. That may not have been what actually happened, but the film’s disjointed nature certainly makes it feel that way.
There are a lot of disjoined aspects to The 13th Wife, from the wide range of acting styles and abilities amongst the cast to stories that seem to have potential but go nowhere. An example is when Rena falls in love with a Vietnam vet who joined the sect but is barred from marrying him when Ervil makes his intentions to marry her known. The love interest completely disappears after that, until we find out his fate late in the first part of the movie.
Don’t get us wrong, we actually are happy to see Huffman back on our screens in any capacity; she’s done sporadic work since she served prison time in 2019 for the college recruitment scandal, so we sometimes forget how good of an actor she is. And she does well with limited material in her scenes recounting her time with LeBaron. We can tell that she feels Ervil’s presence as she talks, not-so-subtly symbolized by her actually seeing Ervil from time to time. But all Huffman is really given to do is stare into space and try to wring emotion out of what’s essentially a glorified narrator role.
The portion of the film that recounts young Rena’s time with Ervil doesn’t really deal in nuance; it makes Ervil look like the charming charlatan that he is and makes his followers — except for Rena — look like brainless lemmings. Given the show’s three-hour (without commercials) runtime, there was plenty of opportunities to explore the hows and whys of Ervil’s charms and powers of persuasion, but the film decided to go for the more spectacular elements of the story instead.
Sex and Skin: Despite all of the multiple marriages, there’s only some brief conversations about the “joy” of sister wife sex (not with each other, but with their husband) and that’s it.
Parting Shot: Josie asks Rena whether, when she was younger, she actually shot Rulon Allred; Ervil directed her to kill the “apostate”.
Sleeper Star: Olga Petsa does a good job as young Rena, who was dragged by her family into following the LeBarons and expressed doubts about their violent mission.
Most Pilot-y Line: Rena’s mother puts up a small paper calendar holder wherever the family moves, and a closeup of that calendar page is what lets the audience know what year it is, a much more irritating device than simply putting the year up as a chyron at the bottom of the screen.
Our Call: SKIP IT. The 13th Wife: Escaping Polygamy feels pieced together, with wildly varying performances and a lack of subtlety about its subject.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.