JFK - 1991
Directed by Oliver Stone (Audio clip)
Starring Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones, Jay O. Sanders, Laurie Metcalf, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Wayne Knight, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, and Gary Oldman
Genre: Conspiracy Thriller/Courtroom Drama
How can anyone possibly review a film like this objectively at this point? 🤔 The mere existence of this film is political and that's just the way Oliver Stone intended it to be. By the time he started filming this, Stone had won the Oscar for Best Director twice the previous five years along with just having convinced a major studio to pony up more than $50 million for him for his last project...which was a 140-minute warts-and-all rock biopic about Jim Morrison which devoted more runtime to rampant drug use than actual music. :/ So clearly he was a director who had acquired enough power to go even further than just directing a "one-for-me" passion project about a subject he had a personal interest in....he had already done that actually six months prior with The Doors which DOES have its moments and also features an amazing performance by Val Kilmer.
JFK was crafted by Stone as a call to action, a 3+ hour document intended to stir shit up and cast a sharp eye on a pretty cataclysmic event in American history....the last time (hopefully) when the most powerful leader of the most powerful country in the world was assassinated. Stone was determined to delve DEEP into the who's, what's, how's, and why's behind this assassination and the conspiracy to cover it up...we think. Because not everything shown during the runtime of this film is based on fact - there's a lot of conjecture and speculation and even just flat-out dramatic license taken with this story. And to be fair, the official story behind the JFK assassination was always presented itself to the general public as pretty hazy and conspiratorial to figure out: just as an example, the "Magic Bullet Theory" always seemed a BIT too convenient so what better way to demonstrate its absurdity than through a well-crafted sequence combining real-life camera footage of the shooting alongside a nicely dramatized courtroom sequence using slow motion, close-ups, tricky camera angles, and utilizing two cast members from Seinfeld no less? :) (Audio clip)
When I first saw this film in theaters just under thirty years ago, I was blown away and of course, I took everything I saw as gospel...I was also 16 at the time mind you. Rewatching it now, I find some aspects troubling - our upright hero DA Jim Garrison (played passionately by Kevin Costner....and with a conniving accent no less!) is taking on a vast conspiracy overseen by the mostly white Military-Industrial Complex....but where most of the folks on the frontlines of this cabal are presented as either deviant homosexuals and/or seditious Latinos (mostly Cubans) determined to tear down our government. However, many of the individuals are presented factually based on their background, it's STILL a bit weird how Stone lingers so much on their sexual escapades in certain sequences...it's all presented as weird, foreign, and creepy and I'm gathering that was for dramatic effect as they're supposed to be the villains...but why?? 🤔 (Audio clip)
It adds color to a story which already has no shortage of it and beyond these scenes, my other main narrative issue with JFK is how much it delves into a fictionalized version of Garrison's sieged-upon family life but we’ll get to that later - JFK is first and foremost a crazy, multi-leveled procedural. This is STILL where the film succeeds and it's just better off not straying from that.
Because this movie just ENVELOPES you from the get-go....we're taken right to some narrated background on JFK's presidency and then events immediately leading up to his assassination. We see this through a mixture of dramatized footage and actual news footage. And the film never slows down from that point forward....except for those scenes at home with Garrison's family of course.
And so much of the drive for the story not only comes from Stone's filmmaking (helped by intricate rapid-fire editing of so many different types of footage and film stock from Joe Hutching and Pietro Scalia) but also from a dazzling array of powerhouse performances from its powerhouse cast! Gary Oldman is quietly creepy as Lee Harvey Oswald, the late great John Candy chews the scenery as local N'Orleans attorney implicated who verbally jousts with Garrison in one memorable scene (Audio clip), Laurie Metcalf is almost comically relentless (but in a good way) speculating on evidence as one of Garrison's investigators, (Audio clip) Kevin Bacon drolly adds some disreputable flavor as a convict/witness, the late great Walter Mathau bringing the heat with a Southern twang, Tommy Lee Jones (the only member of the cast to receive an Oscar nod) is all pomp and grift as Clay Shaw who would be the eventual focus of Garrison's investigation, the late great Jack Lemmon is suitably bug-eyed as a scared witness.....and it just goes on and on and on, that's not even approaching 1/4 of the overall major cast, it's just a murderer's row of top-flight actors each contributing one memorable moment after another...
But to me, the two major standouts are Joe Pesci and Donald Sutherland. Pesci brandishing an outrageous whig (true to his character who has lost his hair mind you) plays the HYPER-active conspirator David Ferrie who just talks a mile a minute while chain-smoking and constantly downing coffee during two tense sequences where we watch him do a significant amount of the heavy lifting towards explaining the overall conspiracy to kill JFK. At one point, he's pacing back-and-forth while the camera cuts between him, news footage, and B&W dramatizations of secret meetings described by him....whether you can actually follow it all or even buy everything he's saying is beside the point, it's just RIVETING. Truly one of Pesci's best performances... (Audio clip)
And a lot of the remainder of the heavy lifting from a conspiracy exposition standpoint comes around the halfway mark from a secret informant who meets Garrison at the National Mall named "X" played by Donald Sutherland and to hear X explain it, this conspiracy included Vice President LBJ himself, half of JFK's cabinet, much of our intelligence community, Cuban ex-pat’s, and several active-duty officers in the US military.
I realize that by this point, JFK The Movie has lost of a lot of folks in the audience and I get it. It's a tough pill to swallow and is it irresponsible for any piece of entertainment to take it THIS far without real proof?? 🤔 It's heavily dramatized speculation all coming from some mystery character whose real identity was never revealed. Stone was definitely walking a tightrope here and whether you follow along with this story from this point on REALLY depends on how effective you find the storytelling plain and simple.
And that brings me to the third act where we watch the actual trial of Clay Shaw who by this point in the movie has been portrayed as guilty of….something peripheral to the Kennedy Assassination...though we're not 100% clear on his level of overall involvement. And it's at this point, Stone almost seems to be going full-on meta: through montage, almost every witness testimony is seemingly discredited so all we're eventually left with is that now-iconic demonstration of the "Magic Bullet Theory," a dissection of the Zapruder film of the shooting, and finally an extended, passionate summation of the case that JFK was murdered by a high-level conspiracy. 🤔
Though I can't get inside his head, Stone HAS to know that all of this wouldn't result in a conviction and he can't alter the real-life outcome but....it's all very cinematic! You may or may not buy all of it but it's expertly filmed, edited, and acted....seriously Costner has never been better even if much of what he's doing with his performance is full-on manipulation. (Audio clip) His voice is breaking at times, he's making great usage of those glasses as a prop, and he even looks directly at the camera at one point and says "It's up to you." So by the time his summation is over, you just WANT to believe Costn....err Garris....err Stone. 🤔 It's a filmmaker pleading to the audience to take action..bottom line. And it's not the first time this has been done with film....nor will it be the last....and don't forget to text "God's not dead" when you leave the theater. ;)
Best Needledrop (best song cue or score used throughout the runtime of the film):
There is so much about JFK which is ramped up in the best way, including the editing and the many of the performances – it’s all very effective at keeping you the audience member on your toes as Stone wants to ENVELOPE you into this story. And along those lines, he gets a very big assist from the film’s composer, John Williams…..yes THAT John Williams, the legend who has given us rousing orchestral scores for the Stars Wars saga, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, and the original Superman. As great as these scores are, they are for the most part conventional music for conventional entertainment.
That’s not often the case here even though the central theme of JFK is very rousing and brass-heavy. Throughout most of the film, however - especially the scenes when we hear someone delving into the conspiracy - Williams’ score sounds very different from his others, very sinister. It’s heavy on percussion especially the use of claves to maintain a steady TENSE rhythm running in the background…and this music just builds and builds with a mixture of bass notes on a piano and low strings conveying both dread and mystery. No track demonstrates this better than one titled…..you guess it….. “The Conspirators”…. (Audio clip)
Wasted Talent (most under-utilized talent involved with film):
The Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek has a truly thankless role as his wife, Liz Garrison - she spends at least 70% of her screen-time reading Jim the riot act about how he's neglecting his family in his DA office's push to file criminal charges related to the Kennedy Assassination. Spacek and Costner do as much as they can with these scenes - and in a 1991 context before scenes like these became overused as a dramatic crutch in many a legal drama - I can KINDA get Stone's (along with co-writer Zachary Sklar) motivation for including them. This clearly an effort to make Garrison more relatable and sympathetic. But they just really add nothing to the story and they’re definitely a waste of Spacek’s talent.
(Audio clip)
Trailer Moment (scene or moment that best describes this movie):
It’s a tough call but for me, but this has to be the ENTIRE sequence where Donald Sutherland’s X explains his angle on the conspiracy to kill JFK to Costner’s Garrison. This extended sequence feels VERY much akin to Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat scenes from All the President's Men....but ramped up to 11 as we often see Sutherland's face in full frame as he rattles off all the ins and outs as to HOW such an obvious assassination would even be possible for a sitting President. We see a lot of backdoor meetings dramatized with grim music from Williams playing over it to nail the point....and that all works. But what helps make this the most convincing portion of this narrative is simply Sutherland's voice - there's a reason he's done SO much voice-over narration over the years. :) He's excellent at sounding both determined and exasperated at the same time...we never really hear him slow down to even catch a breath nor are there any dramatic pauses but you can tell that even HE can't quite grasp what he's saying every once in a while when the inflection goes up. This is the delivery of someone who was already deeply cynical yet taken aback realizing that his cynicism never even scratched the surface. It’s bravura filmmaking with a bravura performance at its center.
(Audio clip)
MVP (person or people most responsible for the success of this film):
At the end of the day for all of its faults and the questions it raises, JFK demonstrates once again that Oliver Stone is a master filmmaker, and as dizzying and sometimes as manipulative as this film can be, it's still amazingly entertaining and engrossing. I can’t think of another modern director who would have pulled this off…..nor would have even tried. If you look at JFK in the context of today’s culture, I’m not gonna lie as I find much of its whole presentation unnerving. Sadly, it could ALMOST resemble a big-budget polished version of a YouTube video detailing some tin-foil conspiracy theory….the difference being that I HIGHLY doubt that an Alex Jones or D’Nesh Disouza or Dennis Prager could have crafted a video essay or knock-off movie THIS engrossing.
For Stone, this was a personal film and a true passion project expressing a POV to question the official conclusions from the Warren Commission – and the Federal Government in general – and on that level, it succeeds. For as many brilliant collaborators who he enlisted to carry this off – including that AMAZING cast – this was still Oliver Stone’s vision and for that reason, he’s the obvious MVP. (Audio clip)
Final Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
As far as I'm concerned, JFK remains an excellent movie from an excellent filmmaker at the height of his powers....but besides acknowledging its flaws several of which have not aged well, it's essential to remember that it's still ONLY a movie!
Enjoy it, rewatch it, but just remember that if you're looking for the actual "truth"…it can NEVER be condensed to one movie...or one YouTube video....or one Facebook post....or one tweet...
Streaming on Roku