A searing look at Fred Phelps, another reason to have Showtime

Last winter I sat in a chilly old movie house with 300 other people and watched one of the most extraordinary documentary films I've ever seen. "Fall from Grace," shot by a KU student, chronicles life inside the Fred Phelps family -- the "God Hates Fags" people who picket at military funerals from coast to coast.

Showtime has bought the rights and will be airing it several times in the next few days, including 9 p.m. CT tonight.

I always thought that news coverage of the Phelps protests, with their screaming voices and faces filled with hate, were giving a cartoonish, and therefore oddly benign, face to the homophobic protests by Westboro Baptist. (They aren't really that freaky, are they?) Filmmaker K. Ryan Jones must've agreed. He asked for, and amazingly got, permission to go inside the compound where Fred and his extended family live their cloistered existence. Their social circle is confined to the true believers. They sit through Fred's endless purple-faced sermons. They hold not-safe-for-work signs at countless protests. And they learn to parrot the same things the grown-ups say about gay people and the biblical wrath that's planned for them.

Jones puts a human face on the movement, so human that reportedly Phelps and his clan have all watched "Fall from Grace" and agreed it does a fine job telling their story. Phelps sees himself as a prophet and publicity of any kind as evidence that he is getting out God's message of judgment to a wicked world. And yet all the evidence to convict Phelps of violating both the spirit and the letter of scripture is there on the screen: the verbal violence, the abusive treatment of family members who don't go along, and above all the sin of anger, anger, ANGER that practically jumps out at you.

Jones also documents the efforts to silence, or at least blunt the effects of, those ubiquitous protests at military funerals. Personally, I think creating more laws just to deal with one group of less than 100 people is a terrible approach. Jones shows us dudes on Harleys forming a shield around the picketers and revving their engines to drown out the chanting -- now that's inspired, even inspirational.

The high point of "Fall from Grace" comes when Jones has two cameras covering a military funeral: one at the gravesite, where mourners are weeping, the other at the protest site, where angry Phelps family members are condemning everyone in sight, while the music of Mozart's "Requiem," with its call-and-response between heavenly female voices and thunderous male voices lends the scene an emotional heft that knocked me out of my seat.