"Jonestown": If all docudramas were this good ...

The phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” has been a part of our popular lexicon for so long — and like everything else in our culture, deep-fried in irony so that you hardly recognize what it once was — that, in a way, it makes the slaughter of Jonestown seem even more senseless than had it simply sunk into oblivion, like the General Slocum.

  At least that's my reaction to “Jonestown: Paradise Lost,” a two-hour movie from the History Channel that makes astonishingly good use of the docudrama format as it relives the horror we could only imagine when, on that day in 1978, we heard that Jim Jones had led nearly 1,000 of his People's Temple followers to the grave.

  “Jonestown: Paradise Lost” airs opposite “24” at 8 p.m. CT Monday on the History Channel. While no one here is questioning the talent of Kiefer Sutherland, and “24's” Emmy was long overdue, you simply must find a way to watch this movie. I saw the Flight 83 films (including the one Sutherland narrated), and I don't think I have ever been so devastated by dramatized fact as I have watching “Jonestown.”

Rick Roberts plays Jim Jones in the reenacted scenes, which are skillfully braided through interviews and vintage film and audio, including rarely-seen films and audio from the People's Temple archive. Looking like Elvis — another pill-popping megalomaniac who would precede Jones in death by one year — Roberts decisively conveys the drug-induced paranoia that turned a charismatic San Francisco folk preacher into a Koresh figure and Guyana into his Waco.

 

But “Paradise Lost” draws even more emotional heft from three eyewitnesses whose interviews appear throughout the film and each of whom barely escaped the bloodshed of Jonestown's last days: Tim Reiterman, a newspaper reporter who accompanied Rep. Leo Ryan to Jonestown; Vernon Gosney, a People's Temple member who made the full psychological loop that drove him into and then out of Jonestown; and, most heart-breakingly, Stephan Jones, the son of Jim Jones, whose candor and courage helped the filmmakers tell a story of fanaticism and ultimate abuse that will make you never want to use that phrase in jest again.

Besides, according to the Internet, it was Flav-R-Aid.

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A PBS documentary on Jonestown by acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson will air this spring.