A country incapable of scandal?

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2000)

The power of JFK as a film is affirmed for me when re-watching our director's cut video of the 1991 film. New information jumps out of the dense montage every time I watch this movie again, usually every 3 to 4 years.
After nearly a decade, however, there is no longer a "frisson" for me in the the courtroom line delivered by Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, pronouncing the JFK assassination to be a "coup d'etat", a secret murder at the heart of contemporary US history. As a Canadian, I witness right-wing US political shenanigans like the recent Presidential election, and it's the same old stuff.
It's been said that a country incapable of scandal is like a body incapable of pain, or a mind incapable of guilt. In my estimation, Stone does his capable filmmaker's best at trying to rehabilitate the scandal muscle in the American body politic. It is not at all clear he succeeds, though, even though his film is great entertainment and a viable "counter myth. It seems that most often when Stone is mentioned in the US media, it's with an angry and derisive rejection of this film, and a deliberate effort to deny him stature as a filmmaker.
Incapable of scandal? Perhaps not, perhaps merely unwilling.