JFK (1991)

Official trailer

A District Attorney

In 1963, Jim Garrison is the district attorney of New Orleans, a tall, earnest, pipe-smoking family man. When President Kennedy is shot in Dallas, Garrison briefly investigates a local connection, a pilot named David Ferrie, and hands him over to the FBI, who release him. Three years later, reading the Warren Commission report, Garrison can’t accept its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

He reopens the investigation, and it consumes his life. His team uncovers a web of strange characters in New Orleans: anti-Castro Cubans, soldiers of fortune, CIA contacts, a gay underworld and a respected businessman named Clay Shaw. Garrison becomes convinced that the assassination was a coup, planned by powerful figures in the government and military who wanted to stop Kennedy withdrawing from Vietnam.

Oliver Stone made JFK in 1991, and Hollywood has produced few films more controversial. It’s also, as pure filmmaking, among the most dazzling. I argue with JFK for three hours and can’t stop watching it. The filmmaking is so ferocious that I get swept up even when I know Stone is selling me something, and that tug of war is half the fun. I think it’s the best-edited American film of its decade, and I also think its history needs a chaperone.

How It’s Made

The first thing you notice is the editing. JFK mixes color and black-and-white, real footage and recreations, 35mm and grainy 8mm, flashbacks and fantasies, often within the same scene. Witnesses describe events, and the film shows us their versions, sometimes contradicting each other, flickering between them in a torrent of images.

It’s overwhelming, by design. You’re supposed to feel buried. Stone wants you to feel the way Garrison feels: flooded with information, suspicious of everything, unable to trust any single account. Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia won the Oscar for editing, and Robert Richardson won for cinematography, and they earned them. Few films have ever been cut like this, and almost none at this length.

The style influenced a generation of filmmakers and television, and it’s still exhilarating to watch, even when you disagree with everything it’s saying.

The editing is the reason this gets a 9 from me. I can’t think of another picture built out of documents and testimony that moves like an action film, and Hutshing and Scalia pull it off by cutting every witness statement like a gunshot.

Costner as Garrison

Kevin Costner plays Garrison as a decent, dogged man of principle, an Everyman crusader in the mold of Jimmy Stewart. It’s a sincere, solid performance, and it steadies the film’s frenzy. Garrison’s obsession strains his marriage to Liz, played by Sissy Spacek, who grows frightened and furious as he neglects his family for the case.

The film’s portrait of Garrison is, however, very generous. The real Garrison was a far more controversial figure, and many journalists and historians argued that his investigation was reckless, that he intimidated witnesses and that his case against Clay Shaw was baseless. Stone presents him as a lonely hero standing against a corrupt establishment. That’s a choice. It isn’t a fact.

Stone’s hero worship here is sloppy. Costner is fine, sincere and steady, but the Garrison on screen is a saint the record doesn’t support, and I’d have liked one scene where the film let him look as reckless as his critics said he was.

An All-Star Cast

The supporting cast is astonishing. Tommy Lee Jones plays Clay Shaw, silky, arrogant and sinister, and he was nominated for an Oscar. Joe Pesci plays David Ferrie, a manic, paranoid, wig-wearing pilot who falls apart in a hotel room, raving that everybody’s going to die. It’s a wild, sweaty, jittery performance, and the scene is the film’s most frightening, because Ferrie seems to know exactly what’s coming for him.

Pesci’s hotel-room meltdown is the scene I’d show anyone who doubts this film can do horror. He’s sweating and raving under that terrible wig, and he scared me more than anything in the courtroom.

Gary Oldman is uncanny as Lee Harvey Oswald, capturing his voice, his manner and his smirk.

Kevin Bacon plays a prisoner who claims to have seen the plotters together. Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, John Candy, Sally Kirkland and Vincent D’Onofrio all turn up in small roles. Half of Hollywood seems to have wanted in. Their familiar faces give even the smallest scenes a jolt of recognition, helping keep three hours of testimony and theory moving.

Mr. X

Its most famous scene is a long monologue. Garrison travels to Washington and meets a mysterious retired military intelligence officer, known only as X, on a bench near the Lincoln Memorial. Played by Donald Sutherland, X lays out, over about fifteen minutes, a sweeping theory of why Kennedy was killed: the Cold War, the defense industry, the plan to withdraw from Vietnam and a military establishment that saw the President as a threat.

Sutherland delivers it with calm, quiet authority, and Stone intercuts his words with a barrage of images. It’s spellbinding, and pure speculation.

X is loosely based on a real man, L. Fletcher Prouty, whose theories were widely disputed. But as a piece of cinema, a character convincing the hero, and the audience, that the world isn’t what it seems, it’s masterful.

The Sutherland scene is the most seductive fifteen minutes Stone ever filmed, and I find it a little dangerous for exactly that reason. I buy every word while he’s talking and then have to remind myself how little of it has ever been established.

Back and to the Left

The film’s climax is the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969, and Garrison’s closing argument. He shows the jury the Zapruder film, the home movie that captured the shooting, and replays the fatal head shot over and over, as Kennedy’s head snaps back and to the left, back and to the left, suggesting a shot from the front, instead of from the Texas School Book Depository behind.

He also demolishes the single-bullet theory, the Warren Commission’s claim that one bullet caused seven wounds in Kennedy and Governor Connally, walking through its path with a pointer and a mocking tone. It’s the most famous piece of courtroom theatre of the nineties, and Costner delivers the long speech with sincere passion.

Then the jury acquits Shaw in under an hour. Stone treats it as a noble defeat. But Garrison’s case was widely seen as having collapsed, and a prosecution many considered unjustified destroyed Shaw’s reputation.

History and Fiction

This is the problem with JFK, and a serious one.

The film mixes established facts, disputed claims, speculation and outright invention, and it presents all of them with the same breathless conviction. Several characters are composites or inventions. Some scenes dramatize theories as though they happened. A viewer who doesn’t know the history can’t tell which is which.

Historians, journalists and critics attacked it fiercely on release. Stone defended it as a counter-myth to the official story and an attempt to make people ask questions. Whatever you think of that argument, it’s worth watching the film knowing that it’s an argument. A documentary it isn’t. JFK did have one concrete effect. It prompted such public interest that Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992. That led to the release of millions of pages of government files on the assassination.

Three Hours of Paranoia

For all its problems, JFK is gripping from start to finish, even at over three hours. Stone builds suspense out of documents, testimony and theories, turning a legal investigation into a paranoid thriller. The pace never lets up for a moment, the images never stop coming and the sense of a hidden truth just out of reach keeps you hooked.

It’s a film about the need to know, and about the fear that the people in power are lying. Whether or not you believe its answers, those feelings are real, and the film captures them with real force.

Stone and Vietnam

JFK makes more sense when you remember who made it. Oliver Stone was a Vietnam veteran who’d already made Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, and the war was the defining wound of his life. The film’s central argument, that Kennedy was killed because he planned to pull out of Vietnam, is really Stone’s argument about how his generation was sent to fight.

That personal fury drives the film’s energy, and it also explains its lack of doubt. Stone is a man with a grievance against the institutions that sent him to war, and JFK is his case against them.

John Williams

John Williams wrote the score, and it ranks among his most restrained and effective. There’s a mournful, military theme full of snare drums and brass that captures the sense of national grief, and a tense, pulsing motif for the investigation scenes.

Williams usually gets remembered for grand adventure scores, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. His JFK music is darker and sadder, and it gives the film’s frenzy an undertow of loss. It earned him one of his many Oscar nominations.

Its Flaws

Beyond the history, the film has other problems. It’s very long. Its treatment of gay characters, portraying the conspirators as a decadent gay underworld, has been widely criticized as homophobic. Garrison’s family scenes are thin, and Spacek is stuck with a nagging-wife role.

The gay-underworld portrait sours me most. It’s cheap, and it’s the one place where Stone’s paranoia curdles into something uglier.

It’s also relentless, start to finish. There’s no room to breathe or to question. That’s exactly what the film accuses the Warren Commission of doing.

Craft Note

Is Oliver Stone’s JFK worth watching?

JFK is a 9 from me as filmmaking, and the history doesn’t deserve anything close. The editing, Sutherland’s bench scene, Pesci’s breakdown and the back-and-to-the-left closing argument make it the most exciting three hours of paranoia Hollywood has made. It stops short of a 10 because it tells its lies with the same conviction it tells the truth, and I can’t fully forgive that. Watch it as an argument and read the history separately.

Frequently Asked Questions