Astonishing

Rating: 4/10 (9 January 2006)

No, not the film. What is astonishing is the number of people who have the garbled notion that this film somehow presented a "true" account of the Kennedy Assassination. Stone takes a little from many of the hodge-podge of conspiracy theories out there and smashes them together into a tedious glop of nothing that an unbelievable number of people who have reviewed this movie to date take to be accurate. Stone's work does a disservice to those people who have spent years earnestly trying to piece together the events of Dallas. Diligent investigators of alternatives to the explanation embodied in the Warren Report have long ago discarded much of the Garrison "evidence." Like Garrison, Stone casts a pall over all of the "conspiracy theories" with his plodding melange of discredited evidence and bogus witnesses. Like Garrison, Stone wants the glory of being THE GUY who solved the mystery. The problem is, his haphazard lashing together of the plausible alternative explanations of the killing with pieces of discredited nonsense only makes it easier for the Gerald Posner's of the world to discredit any and all alternative explanations. Stone (and Garrison) made links that careful alternative researchers have never made. In real life, Jim Garrison knew that his primary witness was perjuring himself regarding the "sinister" aspects of Clay Shaw's movements and alleged connections to Oswald, but Garrison went ahead with the evidence anyway. Stone only compounds the error. But from reading the reviews, it's obvious that as long as Stone plays into the mythology that JFK was a "liberal hero" who would never have made the errors LBJ did with regard to Viet Nam, Stone just has to be telling the truth -- regardless of what the historical records and JFK's own White House tapes reveal. It's equally obvious that for people who find ANY conspiracy theory easier to swallow than the "lone nut" theory, Stone is preaching to the choir. Trouble is, for serious researchers, he set the cause of alternative explanations of the assassination back to about 1968, because now those sincere researchers have to undo all the false connections to discredited theories that Stone made in this film. Posner and his ilk leaped at the chance to reconnect all the looniness of Garrison that careful alternative researchers had put to bed years ago. Even now, serious researchers still struggle with the misconceptions and misrepresentations that Garrison and Stone cobbled together in each man's quest for personal glory.
As a film, JFK does have a few worthwhile elements. Some of the performances are quite good, as to be expected from the stellar cast that Stone assembled. And on many levels, the film excited historical inquiry, which is an inquiry that is seldom a bad thing for any culture. It is ironic, though, that so many who would fault the Warren Commission (only a small fraction of whom have ever attempted to read even the summary sections for themselves) will grasp at straws every bit as ludicrous as the "single bullet" theory simply because those theories fit a preconceived notion that everything done in government is conspiratorial. Even so, portraying Garrison as some heroic crusader would be laughable if he hadn't spent so much of his life ruining the lives of people -- not just in the Clay Shaw matter, but throughout his career as a DA in New Orleans. Stone did not set out to make a documentary, of course, he set out to entertain and to provoke. Unfortunately, it becomes clear in reading the reviews here that there are many, many people incapable of making that distinction.