JFK **** (1991, Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Jack Lemmon, Tommy Lee Jones, Walter Matthau, Kevin Bacon, Donald Sutherland) – Classic Movie Review 2094

Co-writer/co-producer/director Oliver Stone’s stylish 1991 historical legal thriller has got a conspiracy theory or five on its mind. Stone is back mining the Sixties for gold with his version of the story of the events leading up to the November 1963 Dallas assassination of President John F. Kennedy and subsequent cover-up as seen through the eyes of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner).

Stone requires you, perhaps challenges you, to stay awake and alert through its more than three hours running time (188 minutes). He examines all the well-known conspiracy theories. Among them are that Lee Harvey Oswald was the fall guy for teams of professional assassins, and, controversially, that Kennedy’s killing was a coup d’état plot hatched by Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson and US arms makers and implemented by the CIA, all of whom wanted Kennedy dead because he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. However, with the involvement of anti-Castro Cubans, too, the movie’s complex plotline is overburdened with conspiracy theories, and Stone strains to integrate them all.

The movie’s framework is the inquiry by Garrison, depicted as an upright Southern lawyer, into the killing and his pursuit of the only trial associated with it – that of a flamboyant homosexual Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones). Though lightweight in presence, acting power and voice, Costner is acceptable as the hero. But everyone else has a mere cameo, although some of these performers(Jack Lemmon as an old private eye reluctant to turn informant, Donald Sutherland as X, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Walter Matthau as American politician Russell B. Long and John Candy as eccentric lawyer Dean Andrews Jr) are stupendous.

It’s all impressively filmed, using actuality footage to startling, cleverly edited effect, but it numbs the audience with information overload. There’s also an unpleasant whiff of homophobia in the characterisations and portrayals of Jones and Kevin Bacon, who plays Willie O’Keefe, a composite character who testifies that Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw are the same person and that he knew David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), and had met Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman).

However JFK is always fascinating and persuasive and technically it’s certainly a remarkable achievement, winning well deserved Oscars for Best Cinematography (Robert Richardson) and Best Editing (Joe Hutshing, Pietro Scalia). JFK was nominated for eight Academy Awards.  Stone won a Golden Globe for Best Director and in his acceptance speech said: ‘A terrible lie was told to us 28 years ago. I hope that this film can be the first step in righting that wrong.’

There are three other key personnel essential to the classy nature of the movie. Zachary Sklar is co-writer, the score is by John Williams and Victor Kempster is the production designer. Also in the cast are Sissy Spacek, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Rooker, Edward Asner, Vincent D’Onofrio and Sally Kirkland.

Stone and Sklar wrote their screenplay based on Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins and Jim Marrs’s Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Stone described his account as a ‘counter-myth’ to the Warren Commission’s ‘fictional myth.’ This left Stone open to many major American newspapers running editorials accusing Stone of taking liberties with historical facts. There’s no doubt though, that, however much he believes it, he’s deliberately courting controversy, and selling tickets to the movie.

Sklar, a journalist and a professor of journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, met Garrison in 1987 and helped him rewrite his manuscript  about Kennedy’s assassination, changing it from a scholarly book in the third person to ‘a detective story – a whydunit’ written in the first person.

After a slow start, JFK earned $205million worldwide on a cost of $40million.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2094

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com/