Being a sucker for anything about cults as well as a big fan of Ti West’s House of the Devil (2009),
I was about as primed as you can be to see The
Sacrament. It’s completely suspenseful
and effective, and yet I was prevented from enjoying it by West’s bizarre
decision to re-stage a very famous event with no explanation as to why he either
didn’t re-tell the actual story or completely re-adapt it so that it was
different enough to seem original. This
to me is an elephant-in-the-room that burdens the whole film, and West
further compounds the problem by making it in the style of the worn-out and
preposterous so-called ‘found footage’ genre without doing anything new or challenging
in it. These films are appropriately
mocked for containing all the same clichés; professional-grade sound and image,
cameras that are always in the right place at the right time to an extent that’s
implausible and comically absurd, and of course endless scenes of people
fleeing for their lives while remaining quite capable of keeping the camera on
and pointed in the right direction. I
had hoped that West would at least do something to turn this genre on its ear,
or re-invent it, if he really had to
use it; but perhaps I gave him too much credit.
This isn’t as serious a concern for me, though, as the fact of that the
story is a blow-by-blow re-telling of the Jonestown Massacre; even down to a
dead-on impersonation of Jim Jones by actor Gene Jones as ‘Father’ and a climax
consisting of poisoned Kool-Aid and a shoot-out on an airfield. West is a young man, and I kind of got the
impression that he possibly figured the Jim Jones story isn’t as well-known as
it is; that it’s an obscure footnote in history that anyone younger than
himself may not be familiar with, and that he justified this approach by
arguing that he was bringing the story to a new generation. The film claims to be wholly original,
though, which is obviously disingenuous.
But what should really put West to shame is the fact that nothing in his
fictionalized version of the story is as horrifying as the actual film footage
taken leading up to and during the mass-suicide of Jones’ followers in 1978,
which can be seen in the documentary Jonestown:
The Life & Death of Peoples Temple (2006). As far as a narrative approach goes, 1980's Guyana Tragedy with Powers Boothe as
Jones remains the final word on the story to me. West should have 1) made a dramatic period
remake of this if he loved the details of the story so much, or 2) he should
have changed enough of its particulars to create a new story just using the
elements or themes he liked the most. As
it is, it comes off as though he may really have wanted to do the former but
couldn’t afford it. And by failing to do the
latter, he tries to have his cake and eat it too; hoping no one calls his bluff
on either the sloppiness or the laziness of his decisions. The bottom line is that yes, the plot is
captivating, but it seems to me that the credit for this goes entirely to Jim
Jones himself, (who goes unmentioned), not to Ti West, who doesn’t achieve
anything not done better in Guyana
Tragedy or the Jonestown documentary. West’s hope or assumption that young people
won’t care about any of these issues just because they don’t personally
remember the Jones case doesn’t strike me as a very admirable justification for
taking the stylistic approach he does.
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