Warren Jeffs was in the news in recent years, on trial over raping and marrying off a 14-year-old girl. Jeffs, now in prison for his part in the crimes, was the leader of the FLDS, or Fundamental Latter Day Saints, a breakaway group that annointed him as the supreme leader, approving polygamy, use of women as chattel, no education for children, the sort of stuff that makes Americans sneer at some foreign religions who work the same way.
"Sons of Perdition," a semi-documentary by Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merten, a pair of disaffected members of one or another branch of the Momon church, looks at some teenagers who have left, or been forced to leave, Jeffs' group. Many of them live in small Utah towns, bereft of education or knowledge, torn between loyalties to their religious upbringing and the feelings of freedom they now have. But they miss other family members or friends who have remained in the Jeff enclaves. They are unprepared to live on their own, quick to slide into drug or alcohol dependency.
In short, they live a miserable life, and one wonders why they have been ignored by government authorities or not provided with government help. As loudly as Official America seeks freedom and democracy and education for oppressed religious minorities, why is so little done for Americans living in the same situations?
Measom and Merten are anything but unbiased. As they make their film, they are helping the exiles escape Jeffs' control, or aiding families who wish to re-unite. The youths are deserving of sympathy, and of help. Sam, practically illiterate, wants to go to high school, and is joyous when he is able to write a card for Mothers' Day. Joseph, one of 22 siblings, wants to convince his mother to leave. A woman speaks of resenting the fact that she is forced to marry a man, and then to share him "with God, the Prophet and other women."
"Sons of Perdition," the adjective referring to the state in which people live when they are ejected from the Jeffs family, is not an easy fllm to watch. Arrant cruelty never is, and to see people blatantly ignore the law and get away with it, makes it more so.
Sons of Perdition opens today.
—Joe