RENTAL REVIEW: JFK
© A.J. Malouin 2009
(Rating: 3 by The Film Snob.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al and The Film Snob Rate Movies”)
(1991/USA/France. Directed by Oliver Stone. Screenplay by Stone and Zachary Sklar.)
What if a Government which had made a practice of helping engineer coup d’etats within other sovereign nations around the world suddenly decided it was time for coup d’etat within its own country?
That’s the intriguing concept behind Oliver Stone’s film about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November the 22nd, 1963.
Stone’s film postulates that the assassination involved three teams of shooters in Dealey Plaza, instead of the lone gunman which popular mythology has supplied as the explanation of this tragic event.
Mixing fact with conjecture, the film leads us on a fascinating journey into the area of “what if?” In the end, what makes the film so fascinating and riveting is that the facts we supposedly know about the assassination apply more readily to Stone’s conjectures within the film than they do to the investigatory report supplied by The Warren Commission.
“JFK” follows the investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison into the crime in which John F. Kennedy was murdered.
The film follows four different threads which are woven together masterfully by Oliver Stone. The first thread is Jim Garrison’s life before Kennedy’s assassination. The second thread is the events of Friday, 22 November 1963, in Dealey Plaza. The third thread is the arrival of “Mr. X” on the scene, years after Dealey Plaza. The fourth thread is the trial of Clay Shaw, in which is accused Shaw of being a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination.
All four threads of the film are built around Kevin Costner who plays Garrison.
Because each of the four threads has its own pacing and level of emotional impact, it takes a deft hand to bring together into a coherent film.
Stone supplies that deft hand, matching the tempo and feel of each part of the film with that of the others.
The result a 189-minute film not 2 minutes of which feels like a waste of the viewer’s time.
More than that, we are left with a series of unanswered questions in our head and a Real Feeling (yet again!) of queasiness regarding what the U.S. Government may be up to.
Stone’s films postulates no less than that it was the Unite States of America Government, acting in the interests of The Military-Industrial Complex, which murdered John F. Kennedy. The “facts” of the film bear out this hypothesis.
Stone tips his hand in the film’s opening sequence, with the screening of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell message, in which he warns of the evils of the USA’s military-industrial complex.
We then go to set pieces which establish the character of Jim Garrison in the days before the assassination: hard-working to the point of sometimes ignoring his family; stubborn and tenacious in his job, and; above reproach in his integrity.
Next come the horrific events in Dealey Plaza: the blood, the screaming, the chaos, the rush to judgement regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, and the turning of the plot by the actions of Jack Ruby.
Three years go by. Suddenly, Jim Garrison starts noticing things that are just not consistent with the mythology the American people have had drilled into them.
Witnesses have been ignored, or have had their testimony changed in the written record of it.
Alarming numbers of witnesses have died suddenly under what might be thought of as mysterious circumstances.
Evidence which should be available to any authority asking for it has disappeared.
Garrison plunges into this morass with an energy that leaves him time for nothing or anyone else.
A huge turning point, and the third thread of the film, comes when a “Mr. X” — played with chilling effectiveness by Donald Sutherland — sits on a park bench with Jim Garrison. A former participant in some many kinds of U.S. Government “black operations,” Mr. X begins by saying “The purpose of Government is to wage war.” He then details, in a chilling 12-minute monologue how the U.S. Government has actively aiding in the overthrowing of foreign governments. He then states that most of the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination are *identical* to those the U.S. Government would create if it were “overthrowing” the head of a foreign government.
The monologue Mr. X delivers is a totally convincing “description” of how the U.S. Government decided to terminate John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, after all, was moving forward to “make peace” with Khrushchev, and to drag the USA out of Vietnam — both of which were abhorrent to the U.S.A. military-industrial complex. (As a side-bar, when Johnson became President he held a meeting the Sunday before Kennedy’s funeral in which he assured certain American leaders that the USA would reverse the withdrawal maneuvers in Vietnam which Kennedy has initiating.)
In the fourth thread of the film, the trial of Clay Shaw, Garrison gets to deliver a 10-12-minute summation which details all the Incredible flaws in the Government’s description of Kennedy’s murder.
At the heart of The Lone Gunman theory is the postulation that only three shots were fired that day in Dealey Plaza. Garrison points out that, IF that were true, the third bullet would have to be what he decried as “magical.”
To do the damage that was recorded to Kennedy’s and Texas Governor Connally’s bodies, that third “magical” bullet would have had to — among other things — make two right-angle turns in mid-air.
It would have also had to hover motionless in mid-air for 1.6 seconds.
It will be decades, yet, before all the evidence of this murder is made public. Within those decades mice and devils within the archives may, not surprisingly, have eaten most of the damaging evidence.
Meanwhile? One of the main functions of films is create awareness that things may be rotten in Denmark — and in many other places, well.
(3 hr 9. [The USA Director’s Cut is 3 hr 26.] Rated R in the USA for strong language.. In English. With Sally Kirkland as Rose Cheramie, Anthony Ramirez as Epileptic, Ray LePere as Zapruder, Steve Reed as John F. Kennedy’s double, Randy Means as Gov. Connally’s double, Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, Edward Asner as Guy Bannister, Jack Lemmon as Jack Martin, Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald, Sissy Spacek as Liz Garrison, Brian Doyle-Murray as Jack Ruby, Beata Pozniak as Marina Oswald, Tom Howard as L.B.J., Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, Walter Matthau as Senator Long, Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw, John Candy as Dean Andrews, John C. Martin as Prison Guard, Kevin Bacon as Willie O’Keefe, Carolina McCullough as Stripper, Jim Garrison as Earl Warren, J.J. Johnston as Mobster with Broussard, Barry Chambers as Man at Firing Range, Harold G. Herthum as Coroner [as Harold Herthum,] Donald Sutherland as X, John Seitz as General Lemnitzer, Dalton Dearborn, Army General Merlyn Sexton as Admiral Kenney, Steve F. Price Jr. as Pathologist #1, Christopher Kosiciuk as FBI Agent at Autopsy, Price Carson as Tippet, and the contributions many others, as well.)
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RELATED RESOURCES:
“Why We Fight” 2005, Eugene Jarecki, Director.
“Missing” 1982, Costa-Gavras, Director.
“The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” 2004. Errol Morris, Director.