February 2, 2007, The Washington Post, Jim Jones's Temple of Doom; Documentary Gives A Matter-of-Fact Treatment to the Matter of Mass Killing, by Stephen Hunter, 

The human capacity for folly knows no limits, as history teaches repeatedly, but nevertheless a benchmark of sorts was reached on Nov. 18, 1978. On that day, close to a thousand adults and children drank the cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid -- or maybe it was Flavor- Aid -- and kept up with the Rev. Jim Jones on his way to hell.

The sorry story -- Jones's charisma and nihilism, the gullibility of the hundreds of innocent dreamers who followed him, the melancholy aftermath -- has been told many times, yet somehow it's been forgotten of late. So here's "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple," a somber, solid documentary to parade the whole bleak tale before us again, complete to those disturbing scenes of hundreds of corpses in their tees and shorts and flip- flops strewn about facedown in the mud of Jonestown, Guyana.

It would be nice to report that director Stanley Nelson comes up with something new, some illumination, some revelation, some heretofore unglimpsed irony, but he doesn't. Instead, with subtle professionalism and admirable lack of histrionics, he dissects the story of the self-decreed "son of God and Marx" from Richmond, Ind., who offered a racism-free utopia and killed, it seems to me, more African Americans than any white man in American history.

What Nelson has managed to do is uncover 46 witnesses and survivors, to all of whom the madness of 28 years ago remains vivid. All are articulate and haunted; all want to contribute to the record, so in some cases the film feels like a labor of -- no, not love, but a labor of duty, in which these haunted souls, once so simple and now so bitter, record their mistakes, ponder what was and what might have been.

What emerges is a portrait of a monster, and a cautionary tale about buying faith from a door-to-door monkey salesman, Jones's livelihood before he got into the religion business. Far from an unblinking Hannibal Lecter, Jim Jones was a smooth talker who understood the subtle ways of human weakness. He was an orator, a cajoler, an organizer, who seemed to attract two types: radicalized upper-middle-class white bohos who were drawn to his vaguely socialistic schemes, and unradicalized blacks of the lower-class who yearned for a world where "it" could be put behind them, "it" being the issue of race. These groups joined, gave money, time, effort, obedience and ultimately their lives to a man with an apocalyptic imagination (the mass suicide was no improvisation; it clearly provoked Jones so much that it had been practiced, like air-raid drills, in the months leading up to its actual implementation).

Yet under all the bushwa about equality and self-respect, he wanted something else far more primeval, which a friend of mine has summed up well enough: "It's always the same thing," she said about another guru promising utopia, this one named Koresh, "they want to sleep with all the women and beat all the children."

That's pretty much the utopia that Jones engineered -- a utopia, needless to say, primarily for its founder. Everyone else was a tool.

One could argue that Nelson's approach is too intense, too experiential; he fails to grasp a larger point, which is that in its San Francisco incarnation, the Peoples Temple was very much a part of a progressive milieu and not seen as marginal at all, though that is how we remember it, post-mass suicide. But Jones could deliver election workers, petitioners, demonstrators -- political muscle, in short -- to any organization that supported him, and he could turn those same forces against those who turned against him. The film depicts this but, like much else, doesn't interpret it, place it in a larger context. It never points out how valuable he was to those in power and what rewards came his way as a consequence: he was appointed to high-sounding civic jobs, greeted presidents' wives when they came to town to visit. It took way too long for what he was doing to catch up with him; he was too useful to too many people for too long.

As temple involvement in money-laundering schemes became apparent, rumors of child and sexual abuse emerged and media scrutiny intensified, Jones opted for the privacy of the jungles, a hundred miles from a large city, where he could practice his behaviors beyond the scope of monitors, until at last congressmanLeo Ryan, media in tow, showed up on Nov. 14, 1978, and the endgame was set in motion.

Some of the footage is remarkable. Time and again we see the man himself, his heavy eyes shaded behind sunglasses, but his manner knowing and intimate and wise, as he encourages others to call him dad. Quiet tales of horror emerge: the elaborate system of snitches he set up, the breakdown of familial and marital vows, the sessions of violent self-criticism. The prospect of race-free, class-free, communal living sounded so good to his progressive-leaning followers, but the actual practice worked out more along Stalinist lines: a jungle prison camp administered by armed guards at the service of the addled (he had developed severe drug dependency problems) and paranoid despot.

Into this mess walked Ryan, confident that as a congressman with an entourage of reporters, he'd be safe.Ryan ended up facedown in the mud, slain by shotgun blasts, as were four other people.

Tapes of the last minutes are terrifying, as are eyewitness accounts of some who watched their own wives and children go down with grape drink turning to foam on their lips.

The movie is profoundly depressing, offering up an image not of man as the prevailing life form on Earth but as second cousin to the sheep and the marmot. Perhaps to see it is to be forewarned. Let us hope so.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (85 minutes, at Landmark's E Street) is not rated.