JFK movie review & film summary (1991)
Shortly after the film was released, I ran into Walter Cronkite and received a tongue-lashing, aimed at myself and my colleagues who had praised “JFK.” There was not, he said, a shred of truth in it. It was a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. It did not reflect the most elementary principles of good journalism. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.
I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that “JFK” is no more, or less, factual than Stone's “Nixon” or “Gandhi,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Gladiator,” “Amistad,” “Out of Africa,” “My Dog Skip” or any other movie based on “real life.” All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.
Given that standard, “JFK” is a masterpiece. It's like a collage of all the books and articles, documentaries and TV shows, scholarly debates and conspiracy theories since 1963. We know the litany by heart: The grassy knoll, the hobos in dress shoes, the parade route, the Bay of Pigs, Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia, the two Oswalds, Clay Shaw, Allen Dulles, three shots in 2.6 seconds, the eyewitness testimony, the woman with the umbrella, the gunpowder tests, the palm print, Jack Ruby, the Military Industrial Complex, the wrong shadows on the photograph, the Zapruder film, and on and on. These items are like pegs on a child's workbench: We pound one down, and another one springs up.
Oliver Stone was born to make this movie. He is a filmmaker of feverish energy and limitless technical skills, able to assemble a bewildering array of facts and fancies and compose them into a film without getting bogged down. His secret is that he doesn't intend us to remember all his pieces and fit them together and arrive at logical conclusions. His film is not about the case assembled by his hero, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). It is about Garrison's obsession. The film's thrust is not toward truth, but toward frustration and anger. Too many lies have been told and too much evidence tainted for the truth to ever be known. All Garrison can reasonably hope to prove is that the official version is unlikely or impossible, and that tantalizing clues and connections suggest a hidden level on which the dots connect differently.
