JFK
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
In the February 1992 Vanity Fair, no less than Norman Mailer wrote that despite director Oliver Stone's clumsiness with facts, "The first thing to be said about JFK is that it is a great movie, and the next is that it is one of the worst great movies ever made." Leave it to Mailer to have it both ways, but he's doing nothing that Stone himself is not: JFK confirms that the Warren Report is bunk; it also has built-in protections against criticism that Stone's hero, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, was discredited back in the late 60s when he attempted to prove a wide conspiracy in John Kennedy's assassination. Clever of Stone to put those fail-safes into the movie's Garrison. And clever of Mailer to avoid refuting much of Stone's composite theory. It's been years since I've seen a movie I consciously fought against seeing -- but ended up loving. Trying to avoid JFK had nothing to do with what Stone was doing with the purported facts and the ever-expanding periphery of lies, concoctions, suppositions; he is, after all, THE movie provocateur of our time and it's his undisputed right to scorn whatever or whoever he wishes. I hesitated because I didn't want to see that g.d. Zapruder home movie again, or have to once again swallow the claims the Warren Commission didn't cover up what happened. We all feel, no matter what side we take, that whatever the government not only really knows but also what it doesn't know about Kennedy's death, it isn't sharing. It's morally unconscionable that an unelected committee has the authority to deny us files associated with the assassination and enforce that they be kept from disclosure until 2029 -- when the Kennedy and pre-Kennedy generations will be goners. A simple question: What are "they" hiding? Considering the torrent of obfuscation, we the living and -- much worse -- history may never know. (I agree with Edmund Berkeley's prediction: LBJ, with a little help from J. Edgar, Dulles, perhaps Nixon, instigated a coup d'etat. And inspite of his lengthy, detailed "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," Mailer himself concludes that he's only about 75% sure that Oswald did it, and maybe only 60% sure that it did it alone. Not enough for a conviction.) This inconclusiveness the stuff of conspiracy: the government hasn't any irrefutable evidence to support the "lone nut with a rifle" theory -- and Stone's greatest contribution is in destroying, once and for all, Lee Harvey Oswald's marksmanship: not only do Oswald's own military records indicate that he was less than average as a shot, but Gerald Ford, the only living enthusiast-patsy of the Warren Commission, cheerfully embraces the psychodramaturgy that Oswald was a "failure," "sexually impotent, a "victim" of his wife's constant berating, all of which suggests an emotional instability that lessens his chances of being able to fire off, with trees obstructing his view, three rounds from a cheap 6.5 Italian Carbine in roughly six seconds. (One round fired in 0.9 of a second after a previous shot -- an impossibility.) Then there's the "magic" bullet -- the pristine projectile that's the crux of the Warren Report. Ballistics proved it came from Oswald's rifle, yet in exhaustive tests, it was proved not to be the bullet that hit John Connally. Neither could ballistics prove when the bullet was fired nor has anyone explained how it ended up on a Parkland Hospital stretcher. The commission ignored the ballistics conclusions. The disturbing multi-part documentary "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," shown on A & E's "Investigative Reports," produces convincing eyewitnesses who claim one of the shots that struck the president was indeed fired from the infamous grassy knoll -- witnesses whose testimony was omitted from the WR, which also ignored a credible witness who reported seeing two gunmen aiming from the TBR, and, most discomforting, accepted an altered autopsy report on Kennedy that's contradictory to what the Parkland doctors originally claimed. JFK attacks and is an admission of the fact that we the people have, in the end, zilch power.
As pure entertainment, JFK is the American movie of its year. That's its major surprise. Making it inexplicably great is that many of us still can't figure out how Stone was able to put the jangling disparity together in such an intensely consumable style. In scene after scene, we're eating it all up, even when we sense he's gone too far -- especially with the homosexual and Vietnam angles. He's holding us so rapt that we get carried along, feeling surges of excitement we haven't felt from movie viewing in a longer time than we're willing to admit. Of course, if you're a Warren Report diehard, you'll go crazy; if you're a skeptic, as most are, submitting to Stone's disputations is rather like reeling from a pent-up citizenry's vindictive high. The main pleasure is in the acting: does anyone is this three hour epic give a bad performance? Arguably Joe Pesci as David Ferry does, if you don't buy into his paranoia. I did: his performance, like Stone's conspiracy theory, represents a composite of a tawdry underground; Pesci's style of smoking, eyebrows and hair reek of a 60s effeminacy, yet the internalized fury and craziness are authentic to the period. (I've met his physical type.) Ed Asner is a square-faced menace you would think twice about having a drink with; Jack Lemmon does well his renowned weakling number; Donald Sutherland as -- don't snicker -- Mr. X is super-riveting as he lists the various possibilities of why Kennedy got knocked off; Sissy Spacek matches perfectly with megastar Kevin Costner; John Candy and Kevin Bacon are prime comic relief; and Tommy Lee Jones, as Clay Shaw/Bertrand, is resurrected as an actor. Even the real Jim Garrison, looking as if near death (and was), shows up as Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Kevin Costner's portrayal of Garrison is not accurate on many accounts, but Stone's intention is not to depict him as he really was, because that might have left us with a character not entirely sympathetic. There was and still is something heroic in Garrison's persistence in establishing substantial doubt about the excessively wordy Warren Report; but there was nothing but pity and strange, pathetic ridicule left when in real life he was denied at every turn his chance to prove his case -- because all of his central witnesses died before the trial. (This irony supports conspiracy buffs.) Stone sees Costner as a 90s narrator of a smorgasbord docudrama about alleged facts that have come to light long after Clay Shaw was acquitted of any links to Kennedy's death. This is the central reason why Costner's summation runs on and on -- Stone wants to get every conceivable denunciation he can on the filmic record. With the exception of BULL DURHAM, in which he was absolutely dead-on, Costner usually works against himself: he looked like a Playgirl photo op in SILVERADO; he was puny in and misfitted for NO WAY OUT and THE UNTOUCHABLES; in DANCES WITH WOLVES his voice-overs wiped out the tanned romantic illegitimacy of his soldier & Indians fantasy. As executive producer of REVENGE, he was plucking so hard to save the bomb that he lost sight of whatever tiny vision of a movie he was making. His voice proves he's no ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES. (A rushed movie, the only things worth commending are Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's unexpected user-friendliness and some top notch action sequences.) Here in JFK, Costner's vocal limitations are noticeable only in that he's providing a southern accent as affectation that Garrison didn't have or use. In bad clothes, pedestrian glasses and with touches of gray in his hair, he's deglamourized; he's so earnestly bland that while most everyone else around him leaps with paranoid energy, he gains our respect by his sheer ordinariness.
In a speech before the National Press Club in Washington, televised by C-SPAN, Oliver Stone said of the WR, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is not history, this is myth. It is myth that a scant number of American have ever believed. It is a myth that has sustained a generation of journalists and historians who have refused to examine it, who have refused to question it, and, above all, who close ranks to criticize and vilify those who do. Some journalists from the 60s are self-appointed keepers of the flame. They talk about our history and fight savagely those who would question it. But confronted with the crime of the century with no motive and hardly any alleged perpetrators, they stand mute." A few days after the speech, Andy Rooney, on 60 Minutes, joked that Stone was this era's Orson Welles looking for his Rosebud. Rooney unwittingly confirmed Stone's legitimate deploring of our dangerously lazy press: the Rosebud of JFK may be LBJ. (Perhaps if he lives to be able to complete his multi-volume biography of Johnson, author Robert A. Caro will corroborate Stone's contention.) What Stone has really made is his own and much more horrifying and brutal MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Stone's polemic is counter-myth, a refutist's grand mal that gets carried away with spasms of conjecture and invective. It's dazzling, work-me-over movie making in the most flagrant traditions of disreputable press muckraking -- what Ayn Rand's Ellsworth Toohy might accomplish if he were a frothing liberal let loose on The Banner. As you watch the movie unfold, and after you leave the theatre, you think the worst possible thoughts about everybody. Stone's message is much beyond his multi-layered conspiracy: he's admonishing all of us for acquiescing to the volumes of prevarication. JFK makes us feel used, abused and powerless. This combo is the movie's clarion call.
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