One of the great films ever on patriotism
Oliver Stone’s “JFK” is a behemoth of a movie- one so meticulously researched and mulled over that it commands attention down to the most minute detail. But unlike so many others that have focused on the JFK assassination, this movie also has something larger to say about government and our role in it as patriots. That’s where the film turns masterpiece.
It stars Kevin Costner as District Attorney Jim Garrison, who couldn’t disagree with the Warren Commission more that the assassination was carried out by one man. Too many questions were not asked, too many things don’t add up- the whereabouts of Lee Harvey Oswald being one of them, and people are ending up dead. It’s enough for him to launch an investigation of his own.
From there Stone takes us through a Russian nesting doll of a conspiracy concerning everything from witness manipulation, Oswald dopplegangers, cover-ups, links to the Cuban missile crisis + Vietnam, crackpot theories that may have a shred of truth, the CIA, fringe groups, and mob maybe working together, and this is before Donald Sutherland comes in later, as a former black ops guy, who blows us all away with a theory linking it to government war profiteering.
This is an overwhelming amount of information, analyzed and poured over with great skill by Garrison and his team of ciphers, characters that have been refashioned to give us a better understanding of what’s happening. As his lead, Costner takes total charge here, making Garrison an obsessive with a sense of moral duty, a bloodhound hunting for truth and sniffing out holes the Warren Commission, for some reason, ignored.
But for Stone it’s also his most visually entrancing film: one that sets up all sorts of provocative recreations, casting doubts on all three bullets coming from the book depository and the Commission’s magic bullet theory. But he also combines old news footage, black and white flashbacks, and allows us to be flies on the wall regarding scenes of sordid sex and backroom political dealings.
He sets this up as if it’s noir filmmaking, there are all kinds of shady characters here and he hits on a rising evil that began with JFK but did not end there. Those who oppose change would attack and threaten again, with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and Stone brings great urgency and suspense to diving into and analyzing these attacks, as well as what they mean to the country as a whole.
Truth, and shining a light on the perpetrators and the information buried away from public view, has never looked more important. It doesn’t even matter that Garrison never managed to successfully prove his theories. That he bothered to ask key questions, challenge the government on documents and records that they are still keeping locked away, and remind us of our rights as American citizens is patriotism at its finest. Stone draws battle lines here: those who support the government and those who believe the government should have the best interest of the people. As we’ve seen, those two things can be mutually exclusive.
Helping him in his mission is one of the best ensemble casts ever assembled: Sissy Spacek playing Garrison’s neglected wife, Tommy Lee Jones’, so slick and wily, as a gay businessman named Clay Shaw supposedly funding a clandestine group of soldiers on a mission to Cuba, Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, another in on the plot who gets far more paranoid as the film goes on, Kevin Bacon as a witness and gay callboy, Gary Oldman, hinting at nothing as Oswald except that he was a patsy, Michael Rooker, Jay O’ Sanders and Laurie Metcalf are fantastic as Garrison’s team, and some other fantastic cameo work by Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, and John Candy goes a long way too.
It’s sad that Garrison was treated as a crackpot during all of this, and even sadder that most people consider this movie flawed because the theory didn’t pan out. That’s not the point. The point is capturing a time and place where the nation was in mourning and looked to be teetering on the edge of an abyss, capturing the mood of confusion and paranoia abetted rather than aided by our government, asking pertinent questions no one was asking, and remind us of what makes us American. This is three hours of the most intense, enthralling, provocative, and masterful filmmaking i’ve ever seen. At no point does Stone lose his handle on the narrative, how to tell it, or how to drive it home emotionally. It’s one of the best directing jobs i’ve ever seen and it surprises me he and the film didn’t win bigger at the Oscars this particular year. Masterpiece, is right.
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