JFK (1991)

Many of you may not know this about me, but I’m a very flighty person, taste-wise. I often become obsessed with an idea or subgenre or even a specific creator and voraciously devour anything related to it, no matter the medium. The unfortunate flip side of this is that when I get burnt out on something, I really get burnt out, but that's beside the point.

Well, lately I’ve been pining for a distinct type of film that has become one of my favorites over the years: namely, the bleak seventies film. There's a reason this decade saw the release of many of my all-time favorite horror films. For one thing, it was a time before Hollywood became more about making money than art and the rules and regulations of modern films had not yet been codified. Most importantly, however, the world was in something of a paranoid, nihilistic funk at the time which resulted in such masterpieces as Chinatown, Coma, The Conversation, the incredible remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Parallax View, The Tenant and probably a bunch of others I can’t think of right now.

Now, several of those films I just mentioned are conspiracy thrillers that see their protagonists stumble across eldritch truths that end up swallowing them, whether it’s political like in The Parallax View, or psychological such as in The Tenant, and so that has become something of a particular focus for me in the last week or so. That being said, what better place to start than Oliver Stone’s 1991 pseudo-documentary JFK (subtitled The Story That Won’t Go Away) discounting the fact that it’s distinctly not a seventies film at all. Rest assured, it’s got the spirit of the seventies in its blood, even if it bears all the trademarks of a modern Hollywood film. But enough yapping already!

A massive plot

JFK follows New Orleans DA Jim Garrison as he digs into a number of inconsistencies surrounding JFK’s assassination and the Warren Commission in particular. In real life, he was actually the only person to bring anyone tied to the assassination to trial, and so the film follows him on his one-man quest for justice as it seems like the whole world is against him. What he finds at the end of the rainbow might shock you, especially if you’re willing to believe for a second some of the theories the film peddles and don’t apply human psychology to the characters at any point.

You see, I want to make it clear that I don’t really believe in the conspiracy angle. Polls have shown again and again that most Americans believe in a conspiracy, so the kinds of people who buy this shit and believe themselves to be more “awake” than their fellow “sheep” actually represent a majority. They are the mainstream. It’s widely believed, despite life continuing on as though nothing happened, that JFK was shot down by his own government, and that hundreds of potential witnesses have all been killed off in various 'accidents' all while a man like Jim Garrison is allowed to investigate to his heart’s content and then publish his findings without having so much as a single hair on his head touched. I can hear the reply now: “That’s just what they want you to think!”

To the film’s credit, my skeptical interpretation of this story is treated as fair early on. Garrison is depicted as a man with a hole in his soul after the assassination of his command-in-chief. He becomes obsessed with finding answers, even dreaming about the case at night. It wedges itself between and his family, and even loses him a few of his brightest employees. One such employee, portrayed by Michael Rooke, even gives a speech at one point that, while clearly intended to make him unsympathetic to the audience, actually did the exact opposite for me, and credit where credit is due: this means Sttone didn't just bang out a bunch of moron strawman characters to pit his hero against, and that he more or less captured both sides of the argument (during earlier parts of the film, at any rate.) At this point, I was able to really enjoy the film because it didn’t feel like it was preaching to me in that distinct fashion of a crazy person on the street who zeroes in on you and begins filling your ear with a bunch of insane nonsense.

A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma

Then comes Donald Sutherland’s cameo, and everything changes. While it works as a clever nod to the previously-mentioned miserably paranoid films of the seventies (Sutherland also starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Klute, and Don’t Look Now) in a meta sense, the scene just blows, and blows for a while too. And for all its endless monologuing, I can’t really remember a single individual point that was made. From here, the film begins slowly transforming into more monologue than movie, with one long speech following another in rapid succession. It's not hard to imagine Stone absorbed in his work on the film's script, coked up out of his mind, pacing around the room like Joe Pesci does in his big scene, smoking cigarettes, and babbling about how the signs are all around us. It becomes exhausting after a while, though the ending does make a few points that do stick: Why did the secret service muscle their way out of the hospital with Kennedy’s body, refusing to let the Dallas coroner do an autopsy? And what’s up with the magic bullet? (Editor's Note: It has been brought to my attention that the highly compelling bit about the magic bullet is entirely based on either a misunderstanding or an outright lie: Kennedy and Connelly were not, as the film claims, sitting directly in line with one another, so the bullet's trajectory is entirely different from what is depicted in the film.)

It’s a wild ride that seems to accept every conspiracy theory all at once, almost like Bob Dylan’s compellingly contradictory account of the same events in his brilliant "Murder Most Foul." Kennedy wasn’t just shot: he was shot by a team of military snipers simultaneously so that none of them could be sure which of them fired the fatal shot. Furthermore, there weren't three shots, or even four: there were six, and they were just grouped to look like three shots. Kennedy's driver slowed down to a crawl to help them out, a nearby man faked a seizure as a distraction, and another man opens an umbrella to signal someone unseen. It played out like a ritual killing, and everyone was in on it: the military, the mob, Castro, you name it. The film even goes one better by insisting that the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was undertaken by the same perpetrators, presumably just to stamp out any and all chance of the American people being won over by pacifists and cutting into the profits of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, in the real world, Nixon couldn’t keep a few illegal bugs hidden from the American public and Clinton couldn’t hide marital impropriety at the office. So I’m not exactly the whole thing out of hand; I’m just trying to be reasonable, and I don’t feel the bulk of this film’s claims are very reasonable at all. One of the biggest hang-ups I have, and one that didn't really hit me until I was getting ready for work the next morning, is that the film's whole case begins with and hangs its hat on the claims of a few very sketchy individuals, several of whom were part of a so-called "homosexual underground," something that only gets more suspicious when you look into the allegations against Jim Garrison of virulent homophobia during the investigation and trial. 

I’ve heard Stone describe the film as a “counter-myth,” which had me thinking he considered it far-fetched and unlikely himself despite its fascinating qualities, but then he went and made a real documentary about the subject called JFK Revisited just recently, so who knows. I’m certainly not interested in watching that one.

"See the president's head explode!"

But enough of the validity of the material; is the film at least fairly well-made? Well, yes and no. For such a long film, it does manage to keep refreshing itself to keep things interesting in subtle ways. The structure is a big part of it, handling one aspect of the case per half-hour chunk. And I’m sure a lot of critics and audiences at the time loved all the Guy Ritchie-style quick cuts and suped-up music video techniques, though I'm not one of them. It almost feels like a modern film in that it thinks so little of its audience's attention span that it feels the need to spice up every scene of two people talking by cutting away to a hundred different things, sometimes resembling the stock images and videos used as filler by video essayists. And yes, it may have movie stars and expensive talent behind the camera, but there are many times where the whole thing threatens to start feeling like a cheap TV movie, especially once it ends with a drawn-out courtroom drama (Kevin Cosner’s Redbox output has seen him in similar roles ever since) And speaking of the star-studded cast, the only weak link to speak of is fairly obvious: Laurie Metcalf is grating from the moment she first appears. Whose idea was that?

The last thing I want to mention regarding the filmmaking is how uneasy I feel about the incorporation of the real Zapruder film in this Hollywood epic. We get to see John F. Kennedy’s actual head get opened up again and again and again, and I can’t help but feel that it’s a little tasteless to use the real footage in this way. It gets worse from there, however, and soon we’re seeing real autopsy photos, with blood and brain matter strewn everywhere and Kennedy’s empty eyes staring up at the ceiling. This isn’t a documentary after all: would it have been an issue to just recreate some of this stuff with actors?

In the end, while I don’t buy for a second a large number of the film's claims, I do think its parting words are interesting. This film was made three decades ago, after all, and yet all the documents related to the assassination are still not available to the public, proving Garrison right that this killing of a sacred deer is something whose ambiguities will get passed down from generation to generation for a long time to come. It has become a modern myth; one that America has believed in since that fateful day in ’63. For my money, I’d rather watch something with a little more room to use its imagination and a better grasp on filmmaking fundamentals like The Parallax View (still the best JFK assassination film ever,) but if you're really desperate for paranoid thrillers and/or are obsessed with the JFK assassination, I guess JFK is worth at least a watch. Just remember to go over it afterward with a few fact-checkers.