Welcome to an unusual entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
Today's subject is honestly a difficult one to review, as I have wildly disparate opinions of it simultaneously. It is a film to be judged on two separate fronts - as a piece of filmmaking craft, and as a docudrama that had a major impact on the national dialogue surrounding its subject. I would be fully justified in giving this film the Awesomely Shitty Movies treatment as well (and I just may at some point).
The film is 1991's JFK, directed by Oliver Stone, based on two (purportedly) non-fiction books about the Kennedy assassination. Stone's film chronicles the infamous investigation into and subsequent trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, accused by the city's District Attorney Jim Garrison of conspiring to murder President Kennedy. Starring Kevin Costner as Garrison and featuring a veritable who's-who of notable Hollywood stars, JFK spends over three hours taking us through Garrison's chaotic investigation, his interviews with various "witnesses" and informants, and finally the trial itself, which ended in abject embarrassment for the unscrupulous DA.
I first watched this film in high school, going into it with very little prior knowledge of the JFK assassination. I was transfixed by it on the first viewing, and in my college years it had become one of my very favorite films. I took Stone and his collaborators at their word as far as the facts of the case went, and it wasn't until my mid-twenties that I actually dug into the specifics of what happened on that fateful November day in 1963 and the aftermath.
But before we discuss the film's historical accuracy (or complete lack thereof), first let's talk about JFK as an exercise in cinema.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Oliver Stone is an eminently talented filmmaker and storyteller. Even without JFK on his resumé, he'd have proven himself one of Hollywood's most exciting directors of the 80s and 90s with titles like Platoon, Natural Born Killers, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors (another very entertaining but highly inaccurate biopic), Talk Radio and Wall Street.
From a pure filmmaking standpoint, JFK is an absolutely gripping drama, a (deeply fictionalized) tale of one beleaguered justice-seeker railing against a corrupt system, desperately trying to uncover the truth against all odds. Stone's version of Jim Garrison is that of a courageous political idealist who idolized John Kennedy and made it his life's mission to ensure that everyone involved in the assassination be punished for the crime of the century. Aiding Stone in telling this story was a bevy of talented actors - Kevin Costner, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Sissy Spacek, Laurie Metcalf, Jay O. Sanders, Michael Rooker, Brian Doyle Murray, Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, Ed Asner, and Tommy Lee Jones in a performance that garnered an Oscar nomination. Behind the camera you had one of the all-time great cinematographers in Robert Richardson, and in the editing suite, creating a wholly unique collage of color, black & white, and archival footage was Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia (The two Oscars this film did take home were, very deservedly, for those two categories). I've seen this film at least a dozen times over the years, and regardless of its myriad shortcomings as a docudrama, it's incredibly engrossing as an entertainment.
There's just one problem. One major, crippling problem. JFK is totally and completely full of shit. "It's nothing but lies. But they are entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer, is no."
For a prodigiously comprehensive look at just how factually bankrupt this film is, I strongly encourage you to visit https://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100menu.html, which examines in great detail 100 scenes, moments and claims made by Stone and his collaborators about the alleged conspiracy to murder the President. This site covers far more ground than I ever could, and was key to my realizing just how baseless all the theories have been over the last sixty-plus years. Another essential resource is Peter Jennings' 2003 ABC News special Beyond Conspiracy, which you can find on Vimeo. And if you're a JFK assassination deep-diver like me, you can also pick up Vincent Bugliosi's 1600-page tome Reclaiming History.
There's not enough room in this article to debunk all the claims made by this movie, as basically every scene contains at least one lie or distortion, but I'll provide a few examples.
Early in the film we see Jim Garrison discussing the Warren Commission's assassination report with Senator Russell Long (Mathau). Long expresses deep skepticism of the Commission's findings, saying he doesn't believe Lee Harvey Oswald "got off three shots with world-class precision in less than six seconds...and according to his Marine buddies...he wasn't any good." He also states no professional test shooters were able to duplicate Oswald's performance, and that "the first shot would always be the best." This one brief first-act scene features five distinct lies. Simply stunning.
1. Neither the Warren Commission nor anyone else asserted Oswald's three shots were fired with "world-class precision;" the Commission found that the first shot missed entirely.
2. The infamous Zapruder film established 5.6 seconds between the second and third shots. To get off all three shots Oswald needed about 8 seconds, if we accept that the first shot missed (as most do). Regardless though, Stone inadvertently proves Oswald COULD have fired all three shots in 5.6 seconds, in the scene where Garrison's assistant Lou Ivon (Sanders) demonstrates with Oswald's rifle, doing so in 5.15 seconds. I'm not kidding, watch this scene and time it. How was this missed in the editing process?? Talk about a self-own....
3. The idea that Oswald "wasn't any good" with a rifle is pure nonsense; his Marine records include numerous target practice tests where he demonstrated a marksman's accuracy. Oswald might've sucked at everything else in life but the one thing he could do is fire a gun with precision.
4. Oswald's performance has been replicated by other shooters dozens of times.
5. There's no evidence to suggest that the first shot would "always be the best." That's just made up. In Oswald's case, his first shot was obstructed by a tree, while shots two and three were not.
Another example: there's a key witness played by Kevin Bacon, named Willie O'Keefe, a male prostitute who claimed to have met Oswald, Clay Shaw (Jones) and David Ferrie (Pesci) at a party, where he purportedly overheard them planning the assassination. O'Keefe is a fictional character, an amalgam of four "witnesses" questioned by Jim Garrison in real life. The main one was an insurance salesman named Perry Russo, whom Garrison chose as his "star witness" at the trial, and whose information about this alleged meeting was arrived at through multiple sessions of hypnosis and intravenous drugs. Russo's actual testimony at the trial proved so useless that Stone had to invent a fictional stand-in for him. That's pretty damning to your case, Oliver.
Then there is of course the "magic bullet" scene where all the diagrams and Garrison's two assistants depict Kennedy and Governor Connally seated at the same level, directly in line with each other, facing forward, when in fact Connally was seated six inches inboard and three inches below Kennedy, and facing sharply to his right. And once again Stone gives up the ghost by including, in the courtroom scene, the exact moment where both men react simultaneously to being struck with the same bullet, Zapruder frame 224. Dude couldn't get out of his own way.
Perhaps the most deceitful instance of Stone's detachment from historical accuracy though is his portrayal of Jim Garrison himself. Costner's Garrison is depicted as a thoroughly decent man fighting a government-wide plot, an heroic figure who knows his chances aren't promising but fights the good fight anyway, because justice must be served, dammit. However the real Jim Garrison repeatedly showed himself to be an easily-enraged, clout-chasing, opportunistic sociopath, who drugged, bribed and threatened witnesses, falsified findings, and changed various details of his story over the years to sell more books. There is no false detail Garrison wouldn't grab a hold of to support his case, such as the idea that Clay Shaw went by the alias Clay Bertrand (a name invented out of thin air by New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews in a drugged stupor). Even author Mark Lane, whose conspiracy book Rush to Judgment provided a partial basis for this film, was astounded at the falseness of Stone's version of Garrison. Costner's inspiring closing statement as shown in the film by the way? Never happened. Garrison wasn't even in court that day. The script's lionization of this brazenly corrupt, slimy, homophobic person is appalling once you have the facts, and I wonder if Costner did any proper research into the man he was being asked to portray.
There's artistic license, and then there's wanton, unabashed lying. Stone's JFK has plenty of both, and when it comes to the latter you have to ask yourself "What is the filmmaker's intent?" If Stone's heart were in the right place, would there be moments like the one in which a Dealey Plaza witness tells Garrison he saw smoke behind the picket fence, and we cut to a visual of said smoke that had to be provided by a smoke machine since Stone couldn't find an actual rifle to create the type of smoke described? Would the in-flashback portrayal of the two gay characters, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, be one of sensationalized deviancy involving male hookers, poppers and S&M? Would there be the suggestion that the Oswald palm print found on his rifle was taken post-mortem (which is physically impossible since a corpse no longer secretes the skin oil that creates finger prints)? Would Stone have completely omitted Oswald's assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker in April of 1963, an incident which clearly established a pattern of violent behavior?
These are all just flagrantly dishonest inclusions/omissions in a film obviously designed to sway the audience's opinion, akin to a propaganda piece.
The real tragedy is that the authentic story of the assassination and its aftermath is wholly fascinating on its own without Stone and Garrison clouding it with lies. A biopic about Oswald himself would've been an enthralling watch, particularly with Gary Oldman playing him. An honest portrayal of Garrison's investigation and Shaw's trial would draw people's eyes in like a train wreck; Garrison's hubris and pathological need to lie were really something else. But instead we're left with a highly entertaining, but shamelessly manipulative and shamefully dishonest version of events, where a talented but apparently gullible-at-best filmmaker took a malignant narcissist at his word about how this all went down.
Look, regardless if you think Oswald acted alone or if there were others involved, one should not ever try to present this film as evidence of the latter. Anyone who does is being very foolish.
JFK is almost impossible to give a single star rating to. As cinematic craftsmanship it deserves **** out of ****. As a portrayal of historical events, or even an in-earnest attempt at one, it kinda deserves a zero. Stone either didn't do proper research into what happened or he didn't care about being truthful. I'm not sure which is worse.
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