Beyond the Multiplex: Tribeca

Peter Krause, Jason Patric, Sam Shepard and Drea de Matteo light up the screen. Plus: The chilling truth about Jonestown.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex, Tribeca Film Festival

California Historical Society

Stanley Nelson's "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple"

April 28, 2006 | Two days into the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, the mood of this year's crop of independent films appears strikingly dark, even set against a clear, cool and lovely New York spring. It's as if this festival can't escape its roots. It was born while the dust of 9/11 was still settling in lower Manhattan, quite literally, and four years later the shadow of that day's events still seems long indeed.

There are plenty of films in this festival that do flow from 9/11, whether directly or not: Jeff Renfroe's thriller "Civic Duty" (see below); the documentary "The Journalist and the Jihadi," about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (which I haven't seen yet); and the Humvee-load of Iraq war documentaries, which I'll discuss in a future dispatch. But murderous darkness comes in many varieties, and wasn't invented in 2001.

I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple," but if you grew up in the '70s in the San Francisco Bay Area (as I did), you'll have that special cold-sweat feeling of revisiting an old trauma that has never quite been dealt with. It's one thing to know that on Nov. 18, 1978, a Pentecostal minister named Jim Jones persuaded 909 of his followers to kill themselves -- most by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, infamously -- in the jungles of Guyana. That's become a dark legend of recent cultural history.

It's another thing to face the truth about Jones and his congregation: If they were a deranged, quasi-Maoist personality cult (and they certainly had become one by the end), they also were a multiracial and progressive political force, a combination of socialism and evangelical Christianity that seemed irresistibly attractive to many, many alienated people in the California of the 1970s. As Nelson details, Jones was a poor white kid from Indiana who grew up with an unusual sense of compassion for and connection with African-Americans -- but also with remarkable oratorical powers and a strange preoccupation with death.

Nelson has interviewed many surviving members of People's Temple, including two of the five -- just five! -- who escaped into the jungle rather than killing themselves on that day in 1978. Of course you know what's going to happen, and Nelson shows us pictures of the dead early in the film. But nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for their stories of what actually happened, of holding a wife who has willingly drunk poison, or watching your infant son froth at the mouth and die. (We even hear audiotapes made as Jones exhorts his flock, over a chorus of weeping and moaning: "Die with a degree of dignity! Don't lie down in tears and agony!")

But worse than that devastating history, and worse than the Khmer Rouge-goes-to-1984 atmosphere of Jonestown itself, where Jones' (aka "Dear Comrade Leader") recorded rants were broadcast over a speaker system 24/7, is the inescapable fact that decent and good people by the hundreds believed that this man had set them free, and followed him into death without hesitation. Jonestown was built not by neo-Nazis or born-again Left Behinders, but by a coalition of liberal-to-radical African-Americans and whites. Were they brainwashed? Well, sure. But what will haunt me forever is that the pictures don't lie: Those people loved each other and were happy. That's scarier than anything else. Jonestown is where the dreams of the '60s went to die and rot in the tropical heat.

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