Mr Smith goes to Dealy Plaza

Rating: 2/10 (7 October 2008)

There's a great movie waiting to be made about the Kennedy killings and the sheer hogwash the government expected people to accept. Oliver Stone's JFK movie (assessed apart from it's scandal-rich premiere) is a lousy, scatterbrained, corny, half-baked movie. It's made ineptly and it's composed of the flimsiest string of three lonely conceits. 1) A very crappy star turn by Costner, again playing Mr. Morality 2) One or two sequences that clearly received more of Stone's attention (they actually build - Fletcher Prouty) and 3) An all star cast. The script may offer the wobbliest plot ever filmed; a single-minded crusader doesn't have a prayer of winning his laughably assembled conspiracy case; also... he has the defacto "whiny wife" (Spacek). Stone hopes to provide enough surface activity that you won't notice he has no guiding concept, that the all-star cast is actually undermining the movie and the damned thing is going nowhere. Despite earnestness and good intentions, it has no momentum, no ending and precious little intelligence. An overwrought score beats you over the head in an effort to inject some intensity.
The climactic court case is just absurd (and belabored). It feels like Stone needed both a dramatic climax and a morality showdown, and manufactured this weak, weak case to those ends. The case is composed of barely-connected, legally ridiculous courtroom moments; Garrison badgers people whose connection to Clay Shaw is indecipherable until his final 20 words attempt a weak link. If the case actually went as depicted, it's no surprise Garrison lost, because he speechifies about everything except how Clay Shaw is related to the killing.
In casting every role large, Stone bowdlerizes the assassination by advancing a solution that looks trifling compared to the scale of the machinations and his production. In the end JFK's assassination is pinned on some utterly nonthreatening gay bogeyman (an idea that has no place to go) for god knows what reason ...how very small.
In need of passion, the movie pours on the straw-man antics; there's a zero-sum game fight every twenty minutes. Ridiculous lines like "Let justice rain till the heavens fall" and "We're through the looking-glass now, people..." intended to make major dramatic moments are just bad dramatics. Not helping any of this, are some very poor, over-the-top southern accents. Everyone from the south doesn't talk with a full-on, corn-pone accent, but tell a star his character is from the south and it's vocal amateur hour. Metcalf is quite bad. Costner sounds like Elmer Fudd, despite the fact that Jim Garrison himself has a cameo in the damned movie, and has NO regional accent whatsoever. (?!)
The controversy that surrounded the movies opening reflects a legitimate failing of the movie. You would have to be a JFK assassination scholar to detect and determine what elements are factual, and what has been completely manufactured by Stone for the movie. It's all presented as fact. The best that can be said of the movie is, thank God Stone got access to the Zapruder film so that it could be disseminated at a massive, irretrievable scale; placing it in front of incorruptible audience-eyes that won't forget what they've seen. The horror of the 26 second Zapruder film is indelible.