A real labour of love

Rating: 6/10 (22 November 2013)

It's always enjoyable to watch a writer/director undertaking a real labour of love, and it's clear that the subject of the JFK assassination is a real obsession of Oliver Stone's. His resultant film, which sometimes feels very artificial somehow, is basically an excuse for him to fit together every conspiracy theory and idea surrounding the shooting and put them into one unwieldy, ultra-lengthy movie.
JFK is a film that works on details and there are plenty of them here, most coming in during a couple of bum-numbing monologues by Kevin Costner and Donald Sutherland. None of it is particularly cinematic, and you wonder if a documentary might have got Stone's points across in a more sensible way, but somehow it all works and gels together. Costner has never been better than when he plays it straight, and his obsessive investigator brings to mind Jake Gyllenhaal's equally obsessed reporter in another true story, ZODIAC.
One thing that I found rather amusing is Stone's casting of famous faces in small roles, some of them blink-and-you'll-miss-'em. Gary Oldman is barely here, and there are even briefer turns from the likes of Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, John Candy, and Kevin Bacon. Michael Rooker and Tommy Lee Jones both have meatier roles before they became familiar faces, both are cast against type and both are effective with it.