JFK (1991)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1991, JFK is a dizzying film in many ways. I've never managed to sit through the entire movie until I started this project. As happy as I am that I've managed to do so, I'm also pretty glad I will never be obligated to watch it again. It's an amazingly muddled film, difficult to follow at times, yet dazzling in its technique. I'm not sure that any of it is really based upon what happened back in the 1960s, but that's not really the point. What the director/co-writer, Oliver Stone, seems to be saying is that we are only given fragments of historical events anyway, bits and pieces from lots of different sources, and we are thus obligated to put all of this together to develop our own sense of what happened. I certainly appreciate that idea; having earned a bachelor's degree in history, I do understand how we reconstruct past events. But while Stone's approach makes for an interesting film, I don't think I'd want to read a history book composed in that way.

At the center of the story is Jim Garrison, a district attorney in New Orleans who begins to develop his own theory as to what happened in Dallas that November day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. He launches his own investigation, and the movie attempts to follow all of the bizarre twists and turns through speculations about the Mafia, the FBI, Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, homosexuality, the Warren Commission, the reverse vampires (or was that an episode of The Simpsons?), well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, Stone selected Kevin Costner to play the part of Garrison, and he makes for an incredibly boring hero. At so many points during this movie, I wanted to turn it off because I just couldn't believe Garrison was going on another tangent (and I really wasn't interested in following him one more time). While the frustration created by the film certainly mirrors our national frustration with getting the truth about Kennedy's assassination, picking a different person as your primary focus, perhaps someone with a bit more personality, would have made the story more intriguing.

Technically, the film is a marvel. The editing is certainly worthy of praise, the use of a variety of film stocks is a genius move, and with the exception of Costner, the cast is first-rate. It seems as if almost everyone in Hollywood had a role in this film. Watching the entire movie almost becomes a game of "Isn't that...?" However, you can't watch this film and just be intrigued by the editing or the cinematography or the acting or any other of its components individually. You have to return to the story and grapple with what it forces you to consider. I don't turn to the movies for history lessons. In fact, I've even given my students assignments that have asked them to determine how the historical record and the movie version of an event or a person's life are vastly different from each other. So I'm not enraged by what Stone has done or even what he suggests by this film. We will likely never find out the "truth" of who was involved in the assassination, but hopefully, most people will not turn to this film and accept it as an answer. It's really more of a question, and perhaps it's an appropriate question to ask.

Several years ago, I visited my brother for Thanksgiving. He lives near Ft. Worth, so we took a day to drive to Dallas to see the plaza and go to the book depository, which includes among its exhibits a discussion of the various conspiracy theories that have gained prominence in the past 44 years. It was interesting to see just how much of our understanding of Kennedy's death is intertwined with our notions of who might have been involved and the reasons for their involvement. To that end, Stone's movie does justice to one of our nation's lingering obsessions. Just don't ask me to see it again. I might feel compelled to begin my own investigation.