Citizen Kennedy

Rating: Null/10 (18 January 2012)

It is important this film was made, in spite of the huge uproar it caused, the claims of propaganda. It's safe to assume that Stone expected this to function as a valve that would give voice to decades of pent-up frustration with an inept, at worst shady, bureaucracy and government, even a half-paranoid, jagged voice.
But important just the same, first because it taps into a national narrative a part of which you have privately seen unfold, possibly puzzled over the many implications and what your own level of involvement should be, but more in how it suggests that even such a massive narrative seen from so many ends is actually being engineered somewhere, which is a fundamental asset of film noir. We all live in a noir world, small and tossed about by forces beyond comprehension or so abstract as to be completely removed from reality. The idea is that somewhere must be locked away a set of answers that explain this hidden fabric of things, ideally a list of names.
Of course if this conspiracy is true that is devastating for obvious reasons. And if it's not we should feel at least anger about the secrecy, omission and just plain ineptitude involved.
But the point is one way or the other, we do live in that noirish world as we understand it to work and have been co-conspirators in the enigmatic fabrication. We have poked holes in the fabric of things. The damage is irreversible and starts here for the generation that is still responsible for a lot of our storytelling.
This is the gist of the film, the effort to assemble truth from disjointed life creating disjointed truths that further disjoint life. It's purely a Wellesian construct adopted from Kane but even more visual at this point. All sorts of movies unravel at every intersection. Some are testimonies, others memories, still others reports and counter-reports. Photos are animated for us. Zapruder's film. Stone's re-enactment of it but as actual footage. TV screens playing bits that we need to see.
And all that conflated and re-assembled into a trial. Stone's lofty intention is that this would be the trial that never happened, with us in the role of jury. But of course only some of what we've seen can be true at any given time, so at least some of what we've experienced as real from our end is not. Part of the film is lying.
This is a powerful conception that I don't think Stone ever came close to again. It aligns every small individual search for meaning in images with a massive effort to understand collective soul.
It makes a lot of sense that Stone appropriates visual grammar to express this from the enemy side of Eisenstein and Soviet montage. Those were always about a struggle and present action, never a thought. Stone presumes to inherit the agitprop experiment. We are meant to leave the trial animated to take action, probe and question.
But he falters at the last moment with his cloying courtroom sermon. It is evident here that Stone believes himself to be another Jim Garrison fighting to unveil evil. He feels so strongly about the subject matter, so emotionally, the maker slips out among the film. The spell is broken. We get to note that it was all put together solely for our verdict.