JFK (1991)
My eyes tend to glaze when people start trotting out conspiracy theories about the moon landing, 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination. This is despite the latter head-denting event providing a fair chunk of material for my favorite stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks. He once visited the Assassination Museum, a place situated in a Texas bookstore. “They have the window set up to look exactly like it did on that day,” he says during his brilliant Arizona Bay album. “It’s really accurate, you know, coz Oswald’s not in it.” He goes on to point out that visitors can only view this window from a distance. “The reason they do this, of course, is they don’t want thousands of American tourists going to that window each year and saying: ‘There’s no fucking way! I can’t even see the road! Not unless Oswald was hanging by his toes upside-down from the ledge. Either that or some pigeons grabbed onto him and flew him over the motorcade’.”
The late Mr. Hicks was mildly obsessed with the kerfuffle surrounding Kennedy’s November 63 offing and his profane commentary has always been about as far as I wanna run with it. As for JFK, it’s tricky to get enthusiastic about the prospect of a megadose of the limp Kevin Costner, not to mention Oliver Stone in his bombastic 90s pomp. His films usually take up well over two hours of your time while something like 1995’s massive flop Nixon rambles on for more than three.
Hence, the similarly lengthy JFK has never appealed.
And yet it’s clearly a significant film, having cleaned up at the box office, generated a shit load of controversy concerning its accuracy, and flirted with major Oscar success. I’ve long known that one day I will have to take a deep breath and get on with it.
Well, after forty-odd minutes I had no idea what was going on. It seemed to be little more than the pipe-smoking New Orleans District Attorney Costner (having become obsessed with the murder after digesting the Warren Report) wandering around talking to people. The narrative structure is most unsatisfactory, consisting of short scenes that mix real-life footage, still photos, newscasts, black and white recreations of shady meetings and events, and the present-day Costner and his bland deputies interrogating the next dude.
The goddamned thing zips all over the place, leaving me to seek solace in its unintentionally funny bits, such as its homo contingent of a camp, chain-smoking Tommy Lee Jones with a daft barnet, an incarcerated Kevin Bacon playing a professional bum boy, and a bewigged Joe Pesci sporting a pair of thick, stuck-on black eyebrows that immediately reminded me of the chief Satanic bitch in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (although obviously she was taller). Christ, did I really glimpse the overacting, popper-sniffing Pesci dressed as an 18th century dandy pinching the nipples of a gold-painted Jones?
Being an ex-journalist I long ago learned that I never know the truth: I just know what people tell me. And one thing’s for sure: people will say stuff for all kinds of whacked-out reasons. Oliver Stone is obviously convinced that Kennedy’s real killers got away with it, as when a senator says of Oswald: “Nobody’s gonna tell me that kid did the shooting job he did from that damn bookstore… They’re telling us Oswald got off three shots with world-class precision from a manual bolt-action rifle in less than six seconds when according to his Marine buddies he wasn’t any good.”
Still, I wouldn’t rely on Stone’s lengthy version of the ‘truth’ (that insists Oswald was a ‘patsy’, there were multiple shooters and it was a fascist coup d’état) any more than other sources. Frankly, I don’t care who killed Kennedy. It’s always struck me as an American obsession in a totally fucked-up decade that came close to tearing the country apart. Perhaps this means I’m intellectually lazy or a defiantly incurious kind of guy, but when it comes to movies, I prefer entertainment to the most stringent accuracy.
Or at least engagement.
The overlong, action-free JFK (with its bewildering barrage of rapidly fired, impossible-to-keep-track-of information about the CIA, Cuba, the Pentagon, the Mafia et al) is not entertaining. Fellow prosecutor Michael Rooker certainly had my sympathy when he tells Costner: “I’m lost, boss. What are we saying here?”
Mind you, I didn’t mind Donald Sutherland popping up as an ex-black op guy to explain that Kennedy was killed because he was planning to end the Vietnam War and close down the CIA. This meant he was ‘a danger to the Establishment’ and lots of warmongers in the military-industrial complex would end up losing a ton of money. Declining to take a page out of Bertolucci’s book, Stone chose to film this preposterous segment without smearing Sutherland’s mouth in horseshit.
In short, the verbose, numbing JFK (with its yen for wide-ranging conspiracy at the highest levels) comes across as a lecture more than a movie. Now I’m sure conspiracy nuts salivate over it in their paranoid heavens, but I prefer subterfuge to be a bit more plausible, like New Kids on the Block being the first boy band to consist of reptilian-humanoid shape-shifters.
Leave a Reply