The Real Story?

Rating: 7/10 (23 October 2012)

The questions that everyone raises about Oliver Stone's JFK is whether the choice to make the controversial District Attorney Jim Garrison the protagonist/hero of the piece. A cursory glance at even the Wikipedia article about Garrison shows a career full of controversy, his investigation of the Kennedy assassination only the most known.
Kevin Costner plays Garrison who is presented as Mr. Average Man of the new South going through at this time the catharsis of the social change the Civil Rights Era wrought. A couple names known to him surface in reports about the assassination and Garrison starts his own probe. It brings him the most controversy in a controversial career and nearly wrecks his domestic situation as wife Sissy Spacek threatens to leave and take the kids.
The most flamboyant performance in the film is that of Joe Pesci as David Faerie who was the linchpin of Garrison's case. He was the link to the late Lee Harvey Oswald and the collection of folks that Garrison eventually indicted. Remember all the action in the film ended in 1969 a few months before the Stonewall Rebellion. We're introduced in this case to a bunch of gay conservatives, in fact they're downright reactionary. Faerie is a pilot and part of the underground gay culture that New Orleans had. Today it's a lot more open I assure you. Today this bunch would be Log Cabin Republicans.
The group is headed by Tommy Lee Jones playing Clay Shaw who since just about everyone in the Sixties was in the closet, Jones ruled the gay closet in New Orleans at the time. Unlike Faerie or Kevin Bacon who plays a favorite boy toy of the clique and who get busted in bar raids regularly, Jones is rich enough to be above all that. I'm surprised he didn't retain Roy Cohn as an attorney although he probably figured a New York Jew wouldn't go over big in a New Orleans court.
At the time Oliver Stone got pilloried for delving on the gay aspect of the conspirators. That was an error, these guys were what they were. Whether Garrison was really on to something is a whole other matter which we may never know until everything about the Kennedy assassination is declassified.
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are in this and it is on the list of their collaborative work although they have no scenes together. Matthau has a scene on an airplane with Costner and Matthau plays Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana, son of a man who was assassinated himself. He's most skeptical about the Warren Report. Lemmon plays a gumshoe operative working for Edward Asner playing Guy Bannister who was linked to Shaw. He was a nasty, brutal, reactionary drunk and gets into it with Lemmon on the day of the assassination in flashback. Lemmon gives Costner some leads in the right direction.
JFK is a film that provides a view of the Kennedy assassination, but good as it is should be taken with a grain of salt.