‘American Primeval’ review: A bloody western centering women’s survival

“American Primeval,” a new limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, lays its (title) cards right on the table:

“Utah Territory, 1857. Wild and Untamed. The United States Army, Mormon Militia, Native Americans, and Pioneers. All locked in a brutal war for survival. Caught in the bloody crossfire are every man, woman and child who dare to enter this … American Primeval.” If it upsets you to see “primeval” used as a noun, there are more upsetting things ahead, believe me.

Written by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) and directed by Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”), the series plays out against the background of the so-called Utah War, which set Brigham Young and his Mormon flock against troops of the U.S. government and specifically the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a wagon train of some 120 emigrants passing through southern Utah was attacked and killed by a Mormon militia aided by Paiute warriors. (Accounting for most of the war’s casualties.)

Many characters are drawn from life, but the story focuses on the independent travails of two fictional women.

Betty Gilpin plays Sara Rowell, whom we meet with her son, Devin, at the place where the railroad runs out, “somewhere in Missouri.” (It’s St. Joseph, according to the sign on the station.) “Sure doesn’t look like Philadelphia,” says Devin. “Well, that’s a good thing,” says Sara.

Dressed in black, with a Jo March bonnet and a formal, somewhat uptight way about her, Sara is upset that the guide she’s hired to get her across to the far side of Wyoming is late, but it only takes a simple cut to bring them all to the gate of Ft. Bridger, a busy mud-mired stockade, named for the man who built and runs it, real-life person Jim Bridger (a very entertaining Shea Whigham). Nevertheless, she’s missed the connection slated to take her farther west, over the mountains to a place called Crooks Springs, where her husband is supposedly living, but possibly not waiting. Sara’s desire to deliver Devin to his presence drives the decisions she will make across the series’ six episodes, not all, or one might argue not mostly, good ones, but there are other reasons for her to keep moving. There is a bounty on her head for robbery and murder, back in Philadelphia, and a variety of parties who would like to collect it.

After Bridger briefly introduces them to the story’s Han Solo, Issac Reed (Taylor Kitsch, who was Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights”), Sara and Devin fall in with a group of Mormon settlers who are off to join the non-Mormon Fancher Party; unbeknownst to Sara but aided by Devin, they are carrying a stowaway in their wagon, a young Shoshone woman, Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), who communicates only through sign language. Here we meet Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) and his wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who is unsure what she’s doing there, having been a last-minute replacement for the late sister who was supposed to marry him.

Irene Bedard, center, portrays Winter Bird, a pacifist Shoshone chief.

(Matt Kennedy/Matt Kennedy/Netflix)

Smith seems to want to say something about the civilizing influence of women and their survival in a world of unruly and domineering men. Shoshone chief Winter Bird (Irene Bedard) is a pacifist dealing with young braves too eager to fight. A Mormon wife says her three kids are quite enough; her husband says it’s likely they’ll have at least six. Abish is skeptical of the life she’s being brought into, and when Jacob suggests it’s God’s plan, she replies, “Perhaps God makes mistakes.” She isn’t afraid to speak up or talk back — a little too unafraid to believe at times, but she does cut a heroic figure. Sara and Abish and Two Moons, though they endure much, are determined and resourceful, violent only in self-defense. It’s true that Sara is wanted for murder, but you figure it was in a good cause.

The above-mentioned massacre, which our fictional characters survive, sends them spinning off into the separate threads and brings Isaac back into Sara’s story. (Movie logic prompts you to think of them as a couple, whether or not they do.) I won’t elaborate further except to say that, as witnesses to the massacre they become “loose ends” — targets of those wishing to blame it on the Paiutes, and much of what follows involves pursuits and captures and escapes, with many scenes of violence. In less bloody business, Young wants Bridger to sell him his fort, because (perhaps overstating the case) “as Ft. Bridger goes, so goes Utah, as Utah goes, so goes the Mormon religion.” (When Young arrives at the fort, he says, “This is the place,” Smith borrowing the actual words the prophet spoke upon arriving at what would become Salt Lake City.)

As Sarah and her party travel on, they encounter one terrible thing after another, like Odysseus and his crew. Abish, who is not trying to get anywhere in particular, including the place she might be expected to head, has her own trials to endure.

The facts of the complex historical matter are somewhat simplified and compressed, but care is taken to inform the viewer — briefly — that the Mormons were persecuted in Missouri and Illinois and that church founder Joseph Smith was assassinated, to give some background to their defensiveness. But in the context of the story, Young comes off as a smooth-talking fanatic theocrat, his nearly every utterance sounding like a threat; one can imagine him animated as a Disney villain.

Indeed, in the contest of the story, the Mormons are mostly trouble — except for Jacob, though he will become trouble of a different sort. (Spreading the awfulness around, French-Canadian characters — reprising a theme, from Smith’s “The Revenant” — are especially horrible.) By contrast, a U.S. Army officer assigned to keep the peace, Capt. Dellinger (Lucas Neff), is shown as thoughtful and troubled, and the Shoshone village where Isaac was raised as an oasis of healthy human concourse.

The question isn’t whether or not the series is good. It’s good — beautifully produced, with evident dedication to cultural detail, full of interesting if not always palatable characters acted with commitment. (It can’t have been an easy shoot.) That it’s a more conventional western than it seems on the face of it is possibly for the best; it gives the viewer somewhere solid to stand amid all the mayhem. You do expect bad folks to get their comeuppance, except where history disagrees, and some do (and some don’t). But some good folks do too.

The question is, are you interested in living in this mostly unpleasant space for something like six hours? One might even say that the series succeeds by being difficult to watch. (I don’t recommend bingeing it in any case; it’s exhausting.) There is an emotional payoff at the end, if you’re not too numb to appreciate it, but it takes some hard traveling to get there. I will leave that decision, as always, to you.