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JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE
Produced & Directed by: Stanley Nelson.
Written by: Noland Walker & Marcia Smith, based on a story by Smith.
Director of photography: Michael Chin.
Edited by: Lewis Erskine.
Music by: Tom Phillips.
Released by Seventh Art Releasing.
Country of Origin: USA. 85 min. Not Rated.

If anything, this absorbing documentary is too short, a rare occurrence these days. Perhaps it’s impossible, however, to completely understand the mindset that would lead to over 900 deaths, where, in a reversal of the Titanic calamity, it would be babies and children first.

Named for the group’s founder, the Reverend Jim Jones, the rustic settlement in Guyana sharply increased its population in 1977 as more and more fled the United States, where Jones and the Peoples Temple were under close press scrutiny. Founded in 1950s Indiana, Jones’ Pentecostal congregation started out as a multi-racial, old-time religion service. As noted here by a former member, Jones’ services really functioned like a black church led by a white minister. (I once met a minister from Indiana who said that in the 1960s, he admired and envied Jones’ success in crossing the ecclesiastical racial divide.) At the peak of his influence in the mid-‘70s, Jones was chairman of the city housing committee in San Francisco and had met Vice President Walter Mondale and First Lady Roslyn Carter. It was during this time that the Peoples Temple would turn into a Big Brother-run commune with self-policing, Stasi style. A child would inform on a parent, a wife, a husband, for violating the rules, such as expressing the desire to leave the group.

Entirely absorbing, the up-front talking-head interviews distinguish this historical overview, which leads to the mass suicide/murder. Adding to the film’s frankness is the minister’s son, Jim Jones Jr., the first African American adopted by a white couple in Indiana, and two childhood friends who recall his father as a weird kid from the wrong side of the tracks who once killed a cat to give it a funeral.

The viewer is left almost on the edge of his seat. How the surviving members survived and went on with their lives after the deaths of their friends and family is only one lingering question. The timeline of the murders of California Representative Leo Ryan and the news crew covering his visit to the Jonestown compound could have been more detailed. It was this fact-finding mission which set off the imploding chain of events. And Peoples Temple defector Deborah Layton, who is prominently featured in the film, warned the press in May 1978 that Jones was rehearsing a mass murder/suicide with his followers. This piece of foreshadowing is one of other tangential matters not mentioned.

Although there has been at least one made-for-television film based on the Jonestown tragedy, nothing can compare to these survivors’ recollections, a video of the group’s jubilant celebration in honor of Ryan’s visit the night before the deaths, or to hearing the actual audio recording made on November 18, 1978, when Jones urged his followers to drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, declaring it would be “an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” For those who have no or little knowledge about this event, director Stanley Nelson’s account is an eye opener. Kent Turner
October 20, 2006