JFK
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A technical marvel, but an intellectual muddle, and ever so pretentious. Oliver Stone's take on who really killed JFK is compulsively watchable even if indigestible as history.
When I watch a movie that is based, however loosely, on fact, I try to keep "the facts" out of my mind and just watch the movie. With a movie as voluminous and fraught with controversy as JFK, this is darned near impossible, but I think I've managed to keep my feelings about the film in the abstract, and the service that the film has been put to.
In the space of three hours, JFK covers an astonishing amount of information and territory, and presents it in a package that is superbly edited and filmed. It keeps up involved and keeps us tense. What it does not do is provide us with much in the way of real characters, or a story that is not simply a mining of miscellaneous conspiracy theories that, especially after the publication of books like Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED, pretty hard to defend.
Oliver Stone, the director, has chosen to follow the odd saga of Louisiana district attorney Jim Garrison, who got curious about the assassination after the fact and attempted to prosecute a Louisiana businessman, Clay Shaw, for conspiring to kill JFK. In real life, Garrison's ethics and scruples were questionable to say the least, and the story makes for some eye-opening reading. Stone doesn't hesitate a second to whitewash Garrison: the first time we see him, he's wearing a white shirt, and backlit to give him an angelic glow.
Many of the important details about who Garrison talked to, and when, and under what circumstances, are distorted or omitted entirely. What does come across is a sense of urgency and *grand mal* paranoia that few other movies have managed to match. Even if Garrison is dead wrong -- heck, even if *Stone* is dead wrong -- we can still sense what they must have been going through. The rush of names, places, footage styles, all contribute to the general feelig of truth held over. Even if the feeling is a propagandistic one, the fact that the movie works as well as it does can't be denied.
I had an argument with someone after coming out of the movie -- that JFK should be screened along with Leni Rienfenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL as a pair of perfect examples of film propaganda. The other man was appalled that I would dare to lump an obvious Nazi sympathizer in with someone as liberally inclined as JFK. I don't remember the conversation getting much further than that, unfortunately.
Rating not applicable.
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