Proficient, but not really persuasive

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2003)

Oliver Stone's `JFK' is a frustrating little movie. Kevin Costner turns in one of his better performances, which nearly breaks the mold of his limited capabilities as an actor, as Jim Garrison, the D.A. who tried to prove in court that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone shooting JFK on November 22, 1963. Other, better actors turn up in and out of the three-hour movie; Gary Oldman is cutely sinister as Oswald viewed in black and white flashbacks, Joe Pesci is an agitated leader of one of the botched Cuban refugee training programs (prior to the Bay of Pigs) who may or may not have known who killed the president, and Tommy Lee Jones is the Southern businessman Clay Shaw who Costner accuses of having secretly worked for the CIA in the time of the assassination. Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon, Vincent D'Onofrio, Kevin Bacon and Walter Matthau all turn up in quaint cameos as well, but the only real constants in the movie's progression (meaning, flashbacks notwithstanding) are Costner and Sissy Spacek as his wife.
The picture is spectacularly shot and edited, and won deserved Oscars in both categories. All the actors do a fine job, particularly Pesci and Costner, who like I said, almost gets past his creative rut of playing frowning, naÃ¯ve boy scouts (see Field of Dreams, The Untouchables, etc). Stone offers a menu, if you will, of conspiracy theories behind the assassination - to generalize, you can pick from the Cubans, LBJ or the Mafia. While these little vignettes are sensationally delivered, none of them really propel the story forward, but rather provide interesting interludes in the main plot, which is fairly thin: Garrison wants to prove that Oswald either didn't do it at all, or didn't act alone, and ends up bringing Tommy Lee Jones to court because of it. His obsession with the president's death provides a little rocky domestic territory, as his marriage and home life get pushed out of the way, but this too is presented as being unimportant in the big picture.
What is the big picture? Aside from some potentially convincing ballistics information, such as a technical breakdown of Arlen Specter's `magic bullet' theory, Stone didn't really convince me that the JFK assassination was an intricately developed plot to serve an ulterior political motive - maybe that there was a second shooter, at best. His offering of theories, insights as to why the Cubans might have done it, etc, in exchange for evidence supporting the arrest of Oswald didn't sway me rationally like he may or may not have hoped it would. One does not get the opportunity to rethink history, but rather to look at it and try to tie it together as possible with what limited information they have. I guess my point is that some of the proposals in this movie are a little too far-fetched for their own good. As a movie? Well, it makes for an almost exciting, definitely watchable investigation, moving at a grueling dramatic pace that holds the viewer's attention very neatly - until the bizarrely flat final act of the movie. Costner's Garrison makes a staggering speech in the courtroom to prove not so much that Clay Shaw was involved in the assassination, but simply that there's more to the killing than meets the eye. This is a dramatically potent scene, I guess, but it's uneven in comparison to the rest of the movie and makes it more of a tidy presentation and less of a film; as if the two were mutually exclusive. `JFK' is most worth watching due to its clean and engaging management of information, its performances, and its technical proficiency, but not for its quality as an artistic or especially galvanizing motion picture.