There can be few directors who polarize critical opinion like Oliver Stone. One the one hand some people will tell you he's a film-making genius exposing the dark secrets and deep corruption at the heart of the American dream, while others regard him as an overly zealous burned-out lunatic, his mind in a state of constant hyperactive paranoia. The reality probably lies somewhere in between. I just can't decide, but having watched most of his best ( or at least, well-known ) works, I'd have to say that he's an outstanding film-maker, but a crap historian.

I liked Wall Street if only for Michael Douglas' powerhouse performance, but it was painted in strokes that were frankly too broad for me. It was so predictable, really - The minute Martin Sheen turned up as the good ol' blue collar working-class salt of the earth airline worker you knew where the film was going. There's the histrionic excesses of Natural Born Killers, a movie so overblown that even Quentin Tarantino disowned it, denouncing it as over the top. Let's face it: When Quentin Tarantino calls a movie excessive, you know there's a rat to be smelled. His new epic Alexander, which I haven't seen yet, has been soundly thrashed by most critics, and he has started making noises about making a film based on the life of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom he apparently admires very much. Which isn't good.

There are certainly two films in his canon which have drawn more attention than any others. One of them is the truly great Platoon, his devastating portrayal of the disintegration of human morality during the Vietnam War, which deservedly bagged him a couple of Oscars. The other is JFK, which is a difficult movie to review. As a movie of pure entertainment, it is impossible to fault, rattling along from revelation to revelation and constructed with an artist's attention to detail. But JFK was never intended as a movie of pure entertainment, as Stone himself stated at the time. He was on a mission to tell people "the truth" about the Kennedy assassination, and JFK seems, upon first viewing, to contain so much solid and incontrovertible evidence of a vast government / CIA / Cuban / Mafia / God knows who else conspiracy that you find yourself wondering why on Earth it's been ignored for so long. And here lies the movie's achilles heel: Once you begin to dig a little deeper into the background, you realize exactly how much of this film is built on some very wet sand indeed.

Kevin Costner puts in a career-best performance as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who pulls in a suspect named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci at his hyperactive best) immediately following JFK's assassination, supposedly because he was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald's (a fantastic Gary Oldman). Although Ferrie is clearly hiding something, Garrison has no choice but to let him go free, and gets on with his life happily enough until a chance conversation with a US senator three years later. The senator voices his belief that there is no way Oswald or any man could have killed Kennedy with a rifle with three shots in the time it took, and that the official Warren Commission report into Kennedy's death was a total fabrication, designed to cover up the motives of those who really ordered his death.

Garrison re-opens the case, and accumulates evidence that suggests, variously, that Oswald was a covert CIA operative, that the CIA were secretly running guns into Cuba with the help of a local businessman named "Clay Bertrand" and a militant anti-Castro group, that David Ferrie was a part of this operation, and that the assassination of the President was actually ordered by disgruntled military elements in the US government, furious at Kennedy's apparent intention to withdraw from Vietnam, who used this group for their own ends.

Garrison finds his office being bugged, witnessess being murdered, his family threatened and his reputation destroyed as he doggedly persists in hunting for the truth, until the trail leads him to local civic leader Clay Shaw (a brilliant performance from Tommy Lee Jones), who is the alleged "Clay Bertrand". Though he has little evidence to speak of except word of mouth and the fact that Shaw is painted in massively villainous strokes, he brings the first prosecution in the history of JFK's death against Shaw and attempts to expose the conspiracy to the American public.

I'll start with what makes this film great. Firstly, it has one of the finest casts ever assembled in one movie, featuring powerhouse performances from Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Michael Rooker, John Candy, Donald Sutherland, Laurie Medcalf and Jack Lemmon. Then there is the thrilling style of the film's genius editing, cutting and pasting archive newsreels with flashbacks and footage of the famed Zapruder film with a devastating cumulative effect, which reaches its zenith during the heart-stopping courtroom scene as Garrison hammers home his case using Zapruder's chilling movie. JFK is brilliantly assembled and beautifully filmed, and for a film nudging the three-hour mark, it seems to rush past in half that time due to its masterful construction. The script is tight, the dialogue snappy, the music perfect and the acting is of the very highest standard, and as I say, as a movie of entertainment it is hard to beat. If only it could be judged upon these merits, and I'd undoubtedly give it five stars, no question.

But Stone's movie can't be judged solely on these merits, nor was it ever intended to be. The fact is, there are large elements of this film's story which are either pure fantasy or wilfully distorted and misrepresented, and this did not go unremarked upon at the time of release. Stone suffered some serious damage to his credibility for many of the claims made in this film, and in many cases he deserved to. There are a vast number of books, documentaries and websites devoted to the Kennedy assassination if you have the time or inclination to do a little digging, and I won't detail here all of the flaws in JFK, but I will mention the main bones of contention as they are crucial to the movie.

The catalyst for Garrison's investigation was that Oswald, a poor shot with a rifle, was apparently unable to shoot three times in the space of something like eight seconds, therefore there had to have been a second gunman. Whether or not there was a second gunman (and there may well have been), it had already been proven by the time the film came out that not only could the shooting have been perfectly possible, the time frame was significantly longer than the 8 seconds in the movie, and Oswald was in fact an excellent shot with a rifle, according to his military records. Which scuppers that theory.

Then there are the characters of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, believed by Garrison to be involved in an anti-Castro cabal and who plotted Kennedy's death. There exists no evidence whatsover for this, other than Garrison's hunch. There was no evidence to suggest Shaw ever even met Ferrie or Oswald, yet in Stone's version they are all sitting around in a smoky room talking about "triangulation of crossfire" and so on. There is no evidence that David Ferrie had any involvement in the assassination, despite Stone having him make an on-screen confession, or that Clay Shaw ever used the "Clay Bertrand" alias, and Ferrie's death, shown as a violent "silencing" in the movie, was a natural one. Garrison himself was held by many to be deeply flawed and misguided in his actions, and his crusade for the truth was more of a witch hunt than anything else.

The courtroom scene where we hear the famous "magic-bullet" theory was held by many to be conclusive evidence of a conspiracy. The problem is that the seven wounds inflicted on Kennedy and Governer Connolly were in all likelihood caused by the one bullet, when you look at the angles they were sitting at and other factors. Stone even disproves his own theory in the movie: During the showing of the Zapruder film, Garrison states that Connolly shows no sign of being hit, when in fact he clearly reacts on-screen to a bullet strike. And there is the famous "back and to the left" scene which is meant to show us that Kennedy was hit by a second gunman, but is in fact perfectly consistent with a shot from the rear when you research a bit of human physiology.

There's also Stone's highly suspect treatment of homosexuality in this film. Shaw and Ferrie are portrayed as having a gay relationship, for which there exists no evidence, and Stone treats this as evidence of evilness, shooting the gay scenes as being depraved and generally deviant. Hey, if they were gay, that must mean they were up to no good, don't you think? Whatever Stone's own views on the subject, he damages his film critically with such a one-sided and badly thought out depiction.

Perhaps the most crucial scene in JFK is the apperance of "Mr X", a former miltary secret operative, played by Donald Sutherland, who explains to an astonished Garrison how security arrangements in Dallas during the Presidents' visit were tampered with (unproven), how the telephone system went out in Washington for an hour after the assassination to keep the wrong stories from spreading (it didn't), and how various shady military / business types organised the murder of JFK in order to protect their money-spinning Vietnam war. Which is possible, I suppose, and the notion doesn't strike me as being too off the wall, except for the fact that this "Mr X" never existed and was instead based entirely on a man named Fletcher Prouty, an ex-military bod and renowned conspiracy theorist who bowled Stone over.

Amongst other things, he claimed two alien bodies were kept in storage by the US military, the Jonestown tragedy was in fact mass murder carried out by US intelligence, that Franklin Roosevelt died from being poisoned by Winston Churchill, made frequent anti-semitic statements and had a book published by a company which denied the holocaust ever happened. Not, in other words, the most reliable source of information in the world (But hey, won't I look stupid if all that turns out to be true?)

All of which tends to undermine Stone's purpose in blowing open this supposed conspiracy. By relying on extremely dodgy evidence and making up a few facts as he went along, Stone managed to convince alot of people who went to see the movie, until a few more logical and reasoning voices began to point out some uncomfortable facts (and I've only mentioned a handful; the film is riddled with errors). Now, whether there was a conspiracy or not remains open to debate, and there are certainly many unanswered questions regarding the assassination, such as how Oswald defected to Russia then managed to stroll back into America again at the height of cold war paranoia, and the eyewitness testimony of those who heard more than three shots, and the thousands of documents pertaining to Oswald which remained classified for years. But this movie, for all its good points, is not the movie that one should look to for a serious examination of the JFK assassination. As a character remarks at one point, "How the hell do you keep a conspiracy going between the CIA, the FBI, the mob and who the hell knows who else when you can't keep a secret in this room between twelve people?"

The real pity is the fact that shady government dealings and conspiracies undoubtedly do happen, and if one were inclined to be cynical you could point to the recent invasion of Iraq being motivated by western oil interests, and the links between people like Donald Rumsfeld and companies such as Halliburton who have profited from these activities. A movie like JFK merely provides fuel for the fire for those who believe that all conspiracy theories are utter nonsense, and to be fair most of them are, such as the persistently daft suggestion that Princess Diana was murdered. But some of them hold any amount of water when backed up with solid evidence and sound reasoning, and these are two qualities sadly lacking from Stone's film.

There are many good reasons to see this: The acting, cinematography, dialogue, editing and pacing are all some of the best examples of their kind you will ever see. On the other hand, there are some good reasons why this film should be loudly derided (which it was), and perhaps even ignored. It is a fantastically made but fatally flawed movie which plays fast and loose with history and scientific evidence, and the end result can only be described as a missed opportunity to delve into one of the most resoundingly potent events in American history.


(There are countless websites devoted to the JFK assassination if you care to look, but probably the best one for debunking this film can be found at:

http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100menu.html)



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age