Overlong, but not without merit.

Rating: 3/10 (27 January 2012)

This movie is way too long. I have several problems with Oliver Stone's JFK, but most of them can be boiled down to that simple sentence. I don't have qualms with films that run over 150 minutes, but they have to earn those extensive running times. This one does quite the opposite of that, meandering on needlessly at times and including whole sections that do nothing but fill space and drag the film down.
The whole thing screams for a stronger editor, which is ironic because the individual scenes are edited so well, the flashbacks using precise and dramatic cuts to amp up the intensity. I wish that the dialogue hadn't been so drowned out by the musical score during the flashback sequences, but the precision with the editing in them is truly astonishing. The film as a whole was a mixed bag for me, with moments of brilliance clashing with ones that that were direly inconsequential. Stone's focus on the actual case is remarkable, intense high stake interviews under the powerful and long-lasting themes, but the rest of the film runs so flat.
We follow District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) on his investigation into the murder of John F. Kennedy, but there's also way too much time spent on the pedestrian and dreadfully overbearing home life with his wife, played by Sissy Spacek, and children. Oliver Stone has never been good with creating human characters and the domestic side of this film is perfect proof of that, with gratingly awful and overly theatrical verbal arguments where Spacek hams it up in the worst fashion and Costner is hilariously dull in contrast. It's so awkward watching them work together because they have no chemistry as actors and the relationship is so poorly written.
The other supporting characters, though, are the exact opposite; very well written and impeccably acted by the long list of quality actors in the cast. Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Michael Rooker, Kevin Bacon, Donald Sutherland and the Oscar-nominated Tommy Lee Jones are just a handful of the strong men who deliver phenomenal work here. Though everyone in the supporting ensemble manages to impress, there were two actors who really stood out to me; Gary Oldman and Joe Pesci.
Oldman further cements his chameleon status, using no makeup or changes to his general appearance but being completely unrecognizable under the skin of Lee Harvey Oswald, a performance so intriguing and calculated that I was always desperate to see more of him. The film presents Oswald as an enigma and Oldman, who is seen only through flashbacks, captures the essence of the character perfectly. You can always see the mind running in the eyes of this man, but the audience is never sure what he's actually thinking. We never know where he stands and that's what makes the mystery that much more fascinating. Oldman delivers an Oswald who is as much of an enigma as the assassination itself.
Pesci, on the other hand, is an actor that I have always loathed and was very surprised to find impressive here. I didn't think much of him at first, but there's one scene where he blew me away. His character, a weaselly rat who seems to be trying to play both sides, eventually becomes bogged down on all sides of the war for the truth and is paranoid that at every corner lies his own grim fate. We come to a scene at a motel, which is 5-10 minutes of Pesci just flooring the other characters (and the audience) with his desperation, paranoia and overwhelming fear. It's a devastating and utterly intriguing scene that was able to bring sympathy out of me for a character that I loathed prior to it.
That's a great scene, but ultimately it's extraneous to the film at large, and there are a lot of scenes that fit into that category. It seems like Stone wanted to create a paranoia with all of the great staple scenes, but also wanted to create a film to make the case for the conspiracy theory and decided to just cram them together, and a lot of it comes out feeling like there are two separate films going on. There's a scene where Garrison's character goes to Washington D.C. to meet with the mysterious X, who goes on this tangent of informing Garrison of the dirty deeds of the government. Of course he's an informant so he never names names or gives Garrison anything that he can actually use. It's a brilliantly constructed Deep Throat scene, with high intensity and a great performance from Donald Sutherland as X, but it's about ten minutes along and ultimately adds absolutely nothing to the picture.
Just in watching the film there was at least an hour of footage that I saw that could have easily been cut with no harm to the overall picture. There are some great scenes, but it seems like Stone couldn't decide whether he wanted to make a conspiracy thriller or a film to shove the JFK theory down the throats of the audience. It's unfortunate because there's a lot of potential here, but when we live in a time where there's a film like David Fincher's Zodiac that absolutely perfects what Stone is trying to do here, this one just pales in comparison. I don't think this is a film that is going to make a believer out of anyone who didn't already believe in some form of conspiracy in regards to the JFK assassination and ultimately that's all that it feels like it's trying to do, but there's still a fair amount of quality stuff within it. Just not nearly enough for the running time.