Beyond the Multiplex

The year's most powerful documentary reveals the truth behind Jonestown. Plus: What if Bergman had made "The Exorcist"?

By Andrew O'Hehir

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

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

Oct. 19, 2006 | I first saw Stanley Nelson's film "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple" last spring in the Tribeca Film Festival. Amid the bleary buzz of a film festival, you might see four or five movies in a day, and it's easy to become jaded or detached: Oh, it's another earnest drama about a decaying heartland relationship. Oh, it's another documentary about suffering in some distant land. Movies start to look like marketing problems or technical equations, crafted objects rather than works of art. Are the "beats" in the right place? Is the third act mishandled? How will this play to exhibitors? Is HBO interested?

Then there are the movies where you forget all that, the ones that leave you devastated, that remind you that film at its best is a complex and ambiguous medium that uses pictures and sound to explore, and evoke, some of the essential mystery of being alive on planet Earth. Despite the gruesome and sensationalistic character of its subject matter, "Jonestown" is one of those. I knew it was a powerful film when I saw it, and it's stuck with me more than any other documentary this year. (With the possible exception of Eric Steel's "The Bridge," the film about Golden Gate Bridge jumpers, which will also be released this month. Do not under any circumstances watch these pictures as a double bill.)

Nelson won one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants in 2002, based largely on his outstanding historical documentary "Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind." (He also directed "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords," which I haven't seen.) You heard a little low-key murmuring about this award; I think some people suspected that the MacArthur folks were looking for an African-American filmmaker to boost, and felt that in the universe of starving documentarians, Nelson's modest body of work did not stand out.

Well, move on to another target, p.c.-bashers, because since getting his grant Nelson has produced a series of fascinating films, including "The Murder of Emmett Till" -- the best work so far on that era-defining case -- and "A Place of Our Own," an affectionate study of the elite black resort community on Martha's Vineyard. "Jonestown" is something else again. A work of intensive historical research and open-minded, open-hearted humanity, it captures the full scope of trauma and tragedy surrounding the notorious mass suicide in Guyana in November 1978 as no other document ever has or (one suspects) ever can.

As I wrote in April, Jonestown was where the dreams of the '60s went to die. People's Temple, the activist San Francisco church headed by the Rev. Jim Jones, a charismatic Pentecostal minister, did not begin as a creepazoid apocalyptic cult. People who grew up in the Bay Area in the 1970s (as I did) may understand this already, but most of the world does not. The idea that 909 brainwashed wackos followed their nutjob leader into death in a South American jungle is easier to swallow, perhaps, than the idea that those people were a group of essentially normal, loving, idealistic Americans who tried to build a realm of hope in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and ultimately surrendered to despair.

Nelson had no personal connection to Jonestown 1978; he was a young man in New York when it happened. "All I knew about it at the time was that 900-something people had followed this maniac to Guyana and killed themselves," he tells me in a telephone interview. "But the more I looked into it and learned about it, the more I came to understand that wasn't the real story. How do you get 900 crazy people in one place? You can't do it. Which leaves the idea that these were 900 normal people, and maybe that's even scarier."

As he read and heard testimony from former members of People's Temple, Nelson says, "They sounded so sane and so normal. Their reasons for joining People's Temple were good reasons. They were reasons that might attract anybody to join. They sounded like reasons I might have wanted to join. Then, when I started to see the pictures, I was totally mesmerized. Here were all these old black people, old white people. My reaction was: These people would never join a cult! White hippies, young black people with Afros. What could possibly bring all these people together?"

Next page: "It's incredible to hear him preach, actually"