I have a general interest in conspiracy theories while having something of a low tolerance for conspiracy theorists. I find the theories interesting, but they often fall apart with just a little bit of scrutiny. Theorists, on the other hand, can be admirable in their own way because questioning authority is something we all should do, but at the same time, I’m not really interested in making the same leaps they have to their own conclusions.
All that is a long way to saying that I need to set aside my feelings for conspiracy theorists to see if I can give Oliver Stone’s three hour look into one man’s mission to find the real killers of John F Kennedy a fair shake.
Do I really need to do a plot summary on this one? Part of it, at least, is history. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. His purported assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman), was likewise killed not long afterwards by local night club Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray). Those sorts of incidents set off more than a few people’s suspicions, most notably New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Three years after the fact, a conversation with a Senator (Walter Matthau) gets Garrison to thinking: did Oswald really act alone? The Warren Commission’s report had some perceived holes that could be poked into, and there’s a lot of suspicious people involved in all levels of this story. Garrison opts to take a look, becoming obsessed with the case and a number of people involved on the periphery. Garrison believes Oswald was just a patsy for more powerful individuals. Is he right?
Technically, the movie doesn’t say. It does lead the audience in that general direction though, with a story that involves, well, every figure reputed to have been involved in Kennedy’s death including the CIA, Cubans, mafia, and Lyndon Johnson. Garrison, at the risk of his marriage in a series of scenes that reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third KInd honestly, goes after witnesses, often played by familiar actors, and eventually goes to court with his case against one Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones). For Garrison, it’s about truth, justice, and living in a country where the people control the government and not the other way around. It’s a bit easy to see why someone with Stone’s reputation would find such a figure appealing.
Now, before I go much further, a caveat: I was not completely able to turn off my general annoyance at the JFK theories. As I’ve gotten older, and the more I have read on the case, I have essentially come to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. The “magic bullet” theory actually does work out, the distance to kill Kennedy is not as long as it sounds according to people who have actually visited the site, and Garrison’s biggest evidence are a series of conflicting eyewitnesses when, quite frankly, eyewitness testimony is actually one of the least reliable forms of evidence. Factor in the mysterious unnamed figure played by Donald Sutherland–this time reminding me of Hal Holbrook’s role in All the President’s Men–claiming Kennedy was going to end the Cold War and strip the CIA of some of its authority in dealing with foreign affairs, and I end up thinking this sounds like a lot of historical wishful thinking. Bottom line is that did affect how I viewed the film.
And what I saw was either over-the-top or kinda dull. Sure, there are a lot of familiar faces in there including Kevin Bacon, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, John Candy, and Joe Pesci, all of them in fairly small roles and many of them in really bad wigs (the less said about that scene where Jones was painted gold, the better), but what did it all add up to? At three hours, it was too long, and at times, it was more dull than anything else. My experience with Stone shows he can, like many directors whose work I admire, put a distinctive energy to his work. There aren’t many directors whose style comes across as distinctive that way. Stone’s best works matches the restless energy and crack of Tarantino and Scorsese. Here? Well, it was one guy doggedly asking questions to prove a theory I don’t believe in. Sure, the point may be to suggest we should question things because we may not really know the truth, but the movie sure does go out of its way to show Garrison is right regardless, and I can’t really get behind that sort of historic revisionism, even in a work of fiction like this, that purports that what I am seeing is actually the truth. Make it blatantly fictional and I could probably go along with it, but JFK won’t go that way.
Grade: C
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