If you had to guess about the origins of the Gemstone family in the Bible business, the most obvious narrative path is a slippery slope, perhaps some generational decline where the Gemstones feasted off too many collection plates and lost their moral compass. We might, in fact, imagine someone like Abel Grieves, the minister from Civil War–era Virginia who opens this wholly unexpected and inspired premiere episode with a sermon about the Lord’s support for the Confederate cause and later picks through the cash he’s extracted from war widows. (“Nothing is too little,” he tells them with a smug grin.) To say that God supports states’ right is a familiar form of religious hypocrisy, where the elasticity of the Gospel accommodates whatever hateful political nonsense is circulating at the time.
But Danny McBride, who co-wrote and directed this episode, considers the Gemstone origins in reverse: Not as the righteous made corrupt, but the corrupt backing into righteousness. In a guest role that’s been extremely well hidden in the months leading up to the premiere, Bradley Cooper turns heel as Elijah Gemstone, a degenerate con man who sees right through Abel Grieves’s lucrative scam before plugging him in the forehead. Though all Elijah intends to do is take the money and run, fate gives him the opportunity to be his own version of Abel Grieves, which will keep him in clover if he can hide his true identity and dodge the Union bullets that whizz past his ear. Given that the Gemstones have a long history of surviving scandals and other threats to their ministry, it should come as no surprise that Elijah seems cloaked by an invisible shield like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.
After killing Grieves, Elijah gets recruited by the Confederate unit to serve as chaplain, which doesn’t seem like an optional gig but nonetheless draws $50 a month and free meals, an arrangement that sounds more than fair enough for him to fake his way through prayers and Sunday sermons. One of the funniest aspects of this episode is that Elijah is a profoundly lazy grifter, unwilling to invest much effort into making himself a plausible minister. When he’s asked to tend to the war-wounded for the first time, a dying man asks him to pray for his soul and Elijah responds in the most Danny McBride way possible: “I did already. Yeah, it’s done. I’ve been praying the whole time, silently in my mind.” Pressed to say something anyway, Elijah scrambles to come up with the right words for so long that the man passes before he can say anything. That becomes a strategy for him later: If someone’s about to die, try running out the clock.
The beauty of Elijah’s ruse is that nobody can feel comfortable calling him out on it, lest they be branded a sinner. When a Christian approaches him with troubling revelations that he’d been drinking and gambling the night before, Elijah denies everything and labels the man a blasphemer. Didn’t he know that the Bible says you’ll go to hell for going against a minister serving the Lord? (The man has read the Bible, which does not say this, but nonetheless gives Elijah the benefit of the doubt.) Armed with the gold-plated Bible he lifted off Abel Grieves — an object that becomes symbolic as it continues to save his hide and fill his coffers — Elijah’s attempt to deliver a Sunday sermon may be conspicuously brief, but again, no one is prepared to question his credentials.
Real trouble does find him in the form of Ned Rollins, a soldier who recognizes Elijah from a previous run-in at a gambling hall and knows he’s not a real preacher. But Rollins has a scheme the two can run together: A card-loving major happens to be coming through the camp that night looking for a high-stakes game and they can shake him down for all his money. Nobody will look twice at the minister as he’s stacking the deck and losing cash to Rollins like everyone else at the table, and when Elijah takes the biggest pot of the night back from Rollins, it just looks like the arrogant kid has gotten his just desserts. What Rollins doesn’t realize is that Elijah is capable of killing for money, and “honor among thieves” is not a concept he ascribes to, especially when the other thief could expose him.
Yet “Prelude” is not merely about a Gemstone getting away with a foundational religious scam. That would be too simple for a family that’s obviously grotesque and compromised but also not totally divorced from the faith they’re pushing for profit. When Elijah is captured in a Union ambush and his trusty Bible spares him execution by firing squad, the words he offers to his 11 unfortunate cohorts seem to surprise even him in their comforting sincerity. They also suggest something crucial about the Gemstones’ future: He has a real talent for preaching. Elijah absolves them for killing people because “they had to,” rather than doing it for money, which we’ve seen him do twice. He offers his “highest recommendation” for them to get into heaven, as if he’s writing a Yelp! review, but seems to pause to think about the injustice of his life being spared despite his greater sins. “Maybe that’s your grand plan,” says Elijah. “Maybe the rest of us sinners need to stick around a little bit before we can join them in your everlasting glory.”
And with that, Elijah Gemstone becomes a true man of the cloth, even if that cloth will, in future generations, be silky and bejeweled and catch the stage lights at a megachurch. Granted his freedom by the Union army, Elijah could have disappeared like an outlaw, but instead he loads the 11 bodies onto a wagon and makes his way back to a Confederate fort, where he can continue his work as chaplain with a newly polished halo over his head. “It was God who saved me,” he tells the other men, who wonder why the Yanks spared his life. That phony act of divine intervention bolsters his grift, of course, but later that night, Elijah takes out his gold-plated Bible and starts reading it. A cynic would say that actually reading the Bible makes it less likely for him to be exposed as an imposter. But there’s a small, humbled part of him that’s starting to believe.
Uncut Gemstones
• You have to love the vanity of the note Elijah leaves after killing Abel Grieves and stealing his identity: “He was very handsome,” he says of himself, “but may he forever rot in hell.”
• I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to sound off about the level of craft on this show, but The Righteous Gemstones remains the rare series where a word like cinematic is a proper descriptor. The evocation of the period here is far above what would be required of a TV comedy, but there are specific sequences that stand out here, too, like a dynamic tracking shot that faces the Confederate side exclusively as they’re ripped apart by enemy fire. And that’s followed by a montage, set to Waylon Jennings’s “Goin’ Down Rockin’,” that frames blood-and-mud-caked soldiers dead center as if they were sitting for a portrait. Powerful stuff.
• “Could you tell him I’m your assistant chaplain?”
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