February 2, 2007, Seattle Times, "Jonestown" - On the road to paradise, a living hell, by Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times movie critic,

February 2, 2007, Seattle Times, "Jonestown" - On the road to paradise, a living hell, by Moira Macdonald,
Seattle Times movie critic,

"We all wanted to go there. It looked like freedom."

These words, spoken quietly by a survivor of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple about the group's compound in Guyana, haunt the viewer of Stanley Nelson's fine documentary "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple." It's been almost 30 years since the notorious mass suicide on Nov. 18, 1978, in which more than 900 members of the religious cult (including many children) died, exhorted by their leader to drink a cyanide-spiked punch. "If we can't live in peace," Jones told them, "let's die in peace."

It's a devastating story, and the dark mark left on the family members and tiny handful of survivors will clearly never fade. Nelson, the award-winning filmmaker of the 2003 TV documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till," has taken a sensitive, meticulous look at the tragedy, answering many of its questions. Using much footage shot by Temple members (including many photographs recently declassified from CIA investigations), he traces Jones' beginnings as a sometimes violent child who once killed a cat with a knife. A white preacher who spoke of his dream of racial equality (he "talked black," recalled one witness), he gathered a vast, racially diverse flock in San Francisco before moving them to Guyana and beginning rehearsals for mass suicide.

A chorus of voices testify to the group's idealistic beginnings, to its members' desire for a loving community of like-minded souls, to Jones' increasing madness. But the photographs and grainy footage speak even louder: the laughter and hugs contrasting horribly with the photos of the dead on the Guyanese ground, often with arms entwined. The dream was fading by 1977; a magazine exposé had revealed abuse and scandal within the cult. Jones, in insane desperation, gathered his followers together and ordered a mutual end.

Ultimately, the film doesn't entirely answer the massive "why" at the center of this story — that answer died on that day in 1978 — but it's a haunting exploration of an event of unspeakable sadness, which still resonates decades later. A survivor sobs quietly, to Nelson's camera, "And now I can't believe in heaven anymore."