When JFK was released, it occasioned a string of hand-wringing editorials and reviews, arguing that the movie plays fast and loose with the facts, and is downright irresponsible in the way it presents conjecture as settled history. Stone has remained unapologetic about what JFK is, saying his intention was to forge a powerful “counter-myth” to what he sees as the official myth of the crazy lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald (played in the film by Gary Oldman). The ultimate point of JFK isn’t that Kennedy may have been murdered as part of an institutional coup d’état, but that there are powerful, shadowy forces always at work in the United States, usurping democracy by preventing citizens from investigating who’s really using their tax dollars.
Yet somewhat lost in the controversy over whether JFK is “right” or “dangerous” is the matter of whether it’s any good, just as a film. That’s the downside to Stone being such a provocateur: It’s too easy to get sidetracked by arguing with his opinions and the confident way he states them, while losing the handle on what he’s able to accomplish as an artist and storyteller. [...]
So is JFK a good movie? Actually, it’s a great movie that looks better with each passing year. Even aside from what it’s saying, and even with the many, many forced moments, JFK has a mad genius about it. The sheer effort that went into re-enacting not just the assassination, but dozens upon dozens of related incidents and memories—often for the sake of a cutaway that lasts only seconds—is the very definition of “obsessive.” And there’s a design to Stone’s montages that isn’t always evident right away, but becomes clearer the longer the movie plays out, and on re-watching. Frequently in JFK, the pictures on the screen directly contradict the voiceover recollections, or the flashbacks reveal, in fragments, key characters or pieces of evidence that won’t become fully relevant until later. There’s a mesmerizing effect to Stone’s approach, as he leads the audience to pay attention to every fleeting insert shot.
Stone had used this approach before, and would again, and JFK was so successful that its style briefly became fairly commonplace in big historical prestige pictures. It serves more of a purpose here, though, because one of JFK’s points is that even with all that the government was keeping classified, there were still copious public records that had gone largely forgotten: news stories, police reports, and first-hand recollections that all deserve a look, as opposed to the carefully chosen pieces of information in the official files. [...]
JFK is Stone’s effort to turn a nation of watchers—many of whom had already received the information in this film back in the 1960s, but didn’t know then how to make sense of it—into a nation of activists. (“It’s up to you,” Garrison says directly into the camera at the end of the closing argument of the only major criminal trial related to the Kennedy assassination.) But as Stone shows the revolting headshot in the Zapruder film over and over, he also reminds the audience that this is a film about a human being whose administration ended horrifically—and undemocratically.
-Noel Murray’s review of JFK, The Dissolve, Nov 12 2013 [x]
