"Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald?"

Rating: 8/10 (27 February 2004)

As a dazzling display of film-making skill, you'd be hard pressed to find anything quite as efficient as Oliver Stone's JFK. As a document of history, the film falls far short. Using an array of film-making tricks and techniques Stone has created a long but engrossing tale, juggling dozens of remarkable characters and intertwining multiple stories and theories. The regrettable part is that in the end -- like in reality -- you don't know who or what to believe, which would be fine if that was Stone's conclusion. But in mixing reality and fantasy, archival footage and new footage, together to make them indistinguishable, Stone aims at presenting a solution to this great American mystery. Even granting the need for dramatic license, the film has serious issues when it comes to integrity. Just as you can't be just a little bit pregnant, you can't add just a little bit of fiction into fact and claim historical truth.
The irony is that the very paranoia that fuels the film and inspired Stone to fully invest his talent is also the element that robs the film of credibility.
Though Stone hedges his bets a bit by framing much of the story as supposition and presents reenactments of events that may or may not have really happened, the final conclusion that the audience is left with is that President Kennedy was the victim of a vast conspiracy consisting of the CIA, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, LBJ, an oddball band of communist sympathizers and a few odds and ends homosexuals, whose motives are never made clear. Just about everybody is culpable, except possibly Lee Harvey Oswald. By the time Stone's protagonist, the discredited and otherwise long-forgotten New Orleans prosecutor, Jim Garrison, gets Clay Shaw, a gay New Orleans business man, to trial on charges of conspiracy, the film itself seems to have lost all reason. Only the momentum of Stone's storytelling justifies the otherwise inexplicable trail that leads to Shaw.
But, boy what storytelling it is. Cleverly using a cast of name actors -- a move that, no doubt, help get the film financed -- Stone gives identities to a huge collection of characters who might otherwise confuse the audience. This also gives credibility to his illusion of historical authenticity. Using the infamous Zapruder film as a centerpiece to his recreation of the assassination, the film takes on the air of a documentary.
But it isn't a documentary. Much of his depiction of "facts" is discredited theory, crackpot ideas and plain old everyday paranoia. For all of its brilliance, JFK never ties things together into a believable whole. One is apt to leave the film convinced of a conspiracy, but without any real evidence to back up the suspicions.
An added irritation provided by Stone's view is that President John Kennedy is ultimately trivialized by the entire enterprise. Despite the title, Kennedy is almost a nonentity in the film. Though Stone suggests that it was Kennedy's supposed intent to pull out of the war in Vietnam that was the motive for his assassination, that all seems like a wild guess on Stone's part rather than an accepted fact. And Kennedy himself, no matter what his worth was as a world leader, a charismatic politician, a pop icon, a family man or a human being, is reduced to being little more than a human target in Stone's little world. I think Kennedy deserves better.