paranoid fantasies served up as a documentary

Rating: 1/10 (21 October 1999)

I have not seen this movie. How can I therefore render a judgment on it? I have not read any material on Holocaust denial, nor have I read deSade's 'Justine', nor the Nazi Racial Purity laws either, but that does not prevent historically informed and morally centered persons from making judgments on those.
The febrile fantasies of Jim Garrison, a sadly deluded and pitiable figure, have been rejected by the overwhelming weight of respectable reportorial research; his delusions are accepted only by those unfortunates like Oliver Stone whose minds, having wandered too long in the jungles of left-wing paranoia, are now hopelessly lost in the fever swamps of conspiratorial hysteria.
A schizophrenic cannot be faulted, I suppose, for viewing his world as fact; it is, after all, the only reality he knows. But Stone, as a skilled film maker, can most definitely be faulted for making a film which interweaves historical film footage and documented fact with fictional material. The result - as Stone certainly knows - will be accepted by 85% of the American booboisie, to use Mencken's phrase, as a documentary. Thus will a great proportion of those who view this film come to believe, despite a shred of supporting evidence, that Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the military were complicit in the Kennedy assassination. To thus propogate such a monstrous historical falsity is to commit a perfidy of Brobdingnagian proportions.
Stone is to be reviled for making this film, a fitting companion piece to 'Natural Born Killers' for the Movie Hall of Shame.