Paranoid Chic

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2016)

The fact I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone doesn't reduce my sincere admiration for this involving, brilliantly packaged indictment of the processes used to affirm his guilt. As a movie, "JFK" rises above any duty to history to develop what director- writer Oliver Stone calls a "countermyth" to what he calls the myth of the Warren Report.
In short, it became a template for inculcating what I would call "paranoid chic," a desire to question comforting ideas that goes beyond all rational objections to fashion a mesmerizing if flawed piece of entertainment. "JFK" is, in more than one way, revolutionary.
New Orleans, November 22, 1963. While news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy filters through barrooms and reaches the office of district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), an argument between right-wing hothead detective Guy Banister (Ed Asner) and his alcoholic gopher Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon) over strange goings-on in their office escalates into a violent assault. In time, this becomes the lynchpin of an investigation Garrison undertakes that becomes a re-investigation of the Kennedy murder, one that will lead to the only indictment of anyone accused of the president's killing.
Garrison spends much time trying to unravel the "tangled web" at the heart of the killing, with much attention paid to the unique character of New Orleans, a city where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald spent much of his life. With a flair for detail and a pregnant line, Stone puts us at Garrison's side as he closely questions a bizarre character named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) who drove to Texas on that fatal day, he says for some ice skating and geese shooting. Big Jim shakes his head.
"I find your story simply not believable," he says.
"Really?" Ferrie responds amiably. "What part?"
It's a welcome moment of levity that demonstrates Stone's complete command of the material. For more than three hours, he brings up a slew of bigger-than-life witnesses who either convince us with their honesty or repel us with their sinister indifference to what happened. In time, Garrison is mocked on national television, betrayed like Jesus by one of his closest aides, and faces divorce before getting the chance to make the case he has built to a jury in a lengthy yet gripping courtroom sequence, one of the finest ever made.
The sequences work as vignettes, many of them worth watching over and over. Lolita Davidovich shines in a brief turn as Beverly Oliver, a self-described "two-bit showgirl" who once saw Oswald at a club with his future killer, Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray). Tommy Lee Jones oozes southern charm as the man Garrison eventually brings to trial, Claw Shaw.
Only a couple of sequences hint at a larger truth, that Stone is throwing up a lot of clay pigeons in his attempt to fashion his countermyth. One witness, Jean Hill, is ridiculously dragged screaming from the murder scene to be told by officials in a ludicrous scene that she didn't see or hear what she, and we, just did. There is also some misdirection thrown in the direction of three tramps picked up at the scene, which Stone in his 2001 director's commentary admits turned out not to be the assassins the movie paints them as being.
But in the main, the film holds together very well by keeping the focus on Garrison, who speaks forthrightly about what he believes. As in his performance in "The Untouchables," Costner is a master of understatement who saves his passion for the final summation in court. It's hard to keep a dry eye watching him go.
After, you can shake your head all you want. I surely do. But "JFK" has left a mark on the American consciousness that feels well-earned when watching it. By enshrining skepticism as not only patriotic but a citizen's duty, the film successfully pushes a less comfortable view of what life is really all about that has become its most lasting legacy, and does so in a way that makes three and a half hours feel like a handful of minutes. Truly epic, however mistaken.