Film and Felt

It’s hard to imagine a more traumatizing event than 1978’s mass suicide of Jonestown, which left 900 faithful ‘People’s Temple’ members dead, with most of them believing to the last moment that they were sacrificing themselves for a greater cause. Led by Jim Jones—an ordained minister who formed Jonestown as a congregation of political independence and integration—the Peoples Temple was supposed to be a religious utopia of equality, where every dollar earned was put right back into the church in exchange for a holy promise to give its members anything they needed (clothes, transportation, legal assistance…anything at all). And indeed, according to Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones really did start Jonestown with humanity’s best interests at heart. Nelson’s documentary does strong work in starting the film off in Jones’ youth—where he’s depicted as a lonely boy unable to find his place in life—and slowly working its way into the power-hungry stage that mostly ruled his life. Early on, Jones channeled his childhood unhappiness into an understanding of those forced into misery by society, and formed Jonestown for the right reasons—to assist the lost souls (amongst them, many blacks) whom he related to so well. But as he started to sense the control that his great charisma and creativity gave him over the everyday folks, he began to get drunk on the power trip: it seems evident that Jones, who had a dysfunctional upbringing, found the allure of totalitarian reign impossible to resist. From faking miracles to drugs and alcohol to seducing his congregation’s men and women alike, Jones and his Temple became more of a fraud by the day, leading to many once-loyal members leaving Jonestown (Jones would claim his people were free to go if they chose, but in actuality, he viewed their departures as betrayal of the evilest manner). The eventual suicide (really, homicide is the better term) seems like a last-ditch effort by Jones to flaunt his authority; he may have preached it to be a sacrifice for mankind, but it was really a sacrifice for him. Authority was Jones’ drug of choice, and the threat of losing it was too much to bear. Nelson does a good job with a difficult topic; the interviews are fluid and snappy, and there’s plenty of footage that encapsulates just how enraptured Jonestown was with Jim Jones’ vision. All in all, a very solid depiction of a terrible tragedy, one that covers all the angles without overextending itself.