JFK (2003, DVD)

One of the consequences of the shoddy and let s be frank here boring manner in which American history has been taught in our schools is that most of us acquire most of our knowledge about historical figures and/or events from movies and TV shows that are primarily made to entertain or, in the case of war flicks or political thrillers made during World War II and the Cold War, persuade audiences to support a particular cause or government action.

For instance, until I read Stephen E. Ambrose s D-Day: June 6, 1944 The Climactic Battle of World War II, I was sold on many of the notions about the D-Day landings on Normandy as presented in Darryl F. Zanuck s 1962 epic, The Longest Day. Whenever I thought of the events of that historic day, I saw in my mind s eye those American paratroopers jumping out of British Lancaster bombers or their seaborne counterparts of the U.S. 1st, 4th, and 29th Infantry Divisions yelling like banshees as they ran out of their Higgins boats and onto the invasion beaches.

Now, of course, after having read comments by D-Day veterans that say The Longest Day s Omaha Beach sequences are fine entertainment but pure Hollywood poppycock, and especially after seeing Steven Spielberg s more brutal depiction of the landings on that same beach in Saving Private Ryan, I still think Zanuck s film is a classic, but in some ways it s no more accurate than Errol Flynn s 1941 portrayal of Lt. Col. George A. Custer in They Died With Their Boots On.

Which, of course, is okay as long as one realizes that 90% of all movies even based on a true story are made to entertain and not educate the audience, earning a big profit for the studios that green-light them in the process.

And then, of course, there are also films that are made not only to entertain viewers while making bucks for the aforementioned studios, but also to either stir up controversy, create or perpetuate politically-motivated mythology, or in the case of Oliver Stone s JFK, a combination of all of the above.

In the second hour of The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy - originally an ABC News special produced in 2003 to observe the 40th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 there is a section that is devoted to pointing out the distortion of history that is Stone s 1991 pro-conspiracy theory, anti-Warren Commission film JFK.

Stone, whose left-leaning political views are reflected not only in some of the films he has either written or directed (Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July, Nixon) but by the company he keeps (he is an open admirer of the recently retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and his Venezuelan acolyte Hugo Chavez) combines material from two books - Jim Marrs Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy and former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison s On the Trail of the Assassins - that seek to debunk the Warren Commission s conclusions that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot President Kennedy in Dallas Dealey Plaza from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on that fateful day in November of 1963.

Stone s thesis, as he and co-screenwriter Zachary Sklar propose in JFK, is that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an acquiescent media, anti-Castro Cubans, the New Orleans mob, and various shady or supposedly shady characters all schemed, either together or in a somewhat coincidental manner, to kill President Kennedy because of his liberal policies toward the Soviet Union, Castro s Cuba, and Vietnam, where 20,000 American advisors were propping up a corrupt but pro-U.S. South Vietnamese government against both a local Communist guerrilla group called the Viet Cong and its Soviet-backed sponsor North Vietnam.

To make Garrison a bit more palatable cinematic hero than the somewhat erratic and controversial New Orleans DA, Stone shrewdly cast Kevin Costner, the clean-cut actor-director who had played Eliot Ness in the Brian De Palma film version of The Untouchables and had just won several Academy Awards for Dances With Wolves. With his good looks and capacity to project earnestness and true patriotism, Costner gives Stone s Garrison an aura of integrity and unimpeachable courage and determination as he doggedly tries to prove that the influential Big Easy businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), the hyperkinetic pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), and others (including a male prostitute played by Kevin Bacon) were either part of or knew about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in order to press forward a vast right wing conspiracy to escalate the Vietnam War and increase profits for the military-industrial complex that outgoing President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address (which is part of Stone s opening montage of news footage and commentary at the beginning of JFK).

The film portrays Garrison as a DA who at first wants to help the government in its investigation of Kennedy s assassination but is coldly rebuffed after he presents the Feds with some New Orleans links to Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray), then becomes skeptical after reading the Warren Commission s Report.

Skepticism then gradually leads to an almost single-minded obsession when, four years after the Kennedy assassination, Willie O Keefe (Bacon) claims to have seen Shaw, Ferrie, and even Oswald (Gary Oldman) discussing the murder plot.

Garrison then indicts Shaw for his alleged role in the conspiracy, digging everywhere for evidence and finding juicy tidbits - which include a copy of the Time-Life owned Zapruder film and hints from a shadowy Air Force colonel known as X (Donald Sutherland - and conducting a wonderfully-written (but now debunked) and sarcastic deconstruction of the Magic Bullet theory, which Stone and Sklar twist to make Garrison s (and theirs) case that Lee Harvey Oswald was just a patsy and that the military, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, and other agencies acted in various ways to kill the President of the United States.

Jim Garrison: Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren Commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the Mob used anything but .38's for hits, up close. The Mob wouldn't have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish... a coup d'etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.

To go into all the wildly inaccurate statements of fact in JFK would be too time-consuming for this reviewer, and would make this critique unbearably long. However, it is worth pointing out a few things that are very relevant as far as Stone s premise is concerned.

In one crucial interview between Garrison and Louisiana Senator Russell B. Long (Walter Matthau), the legislator tells the DA that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who later defected to the Soviet Union and had tried to kill a well-known ex-Army general famous for his fanatical right-wing views, was a lousy shot, saying that at the firing range, Oswald often got Maggie s Drawers.

You know what that means? Long asks Garrison rhetorically. Means he wasn t any good.

Actually, Oswald s U.S.M.C. rifle practice scores show that although at first he had trouble using the M-1 rifle when he joined the service in 1956, he improved his marksmanship and was qualified as a Sharpshooter.

Also, the film claims that there was a blackout in Washington, DC of phone communications. This is pure baloney. There was a disruption of service caused by the increase in phone calls after the assassination, but not a deliberate cutting the lines sort of thing as Stone slyly suggests.

As a movie, JFK is particularly well-made. Stone s cast is truly an A-list of great actors, and the real-life Garrison even makes a brief cameo appearance as Chief Justice Earl Warren, and so does Beverly Oliver, perhaps better known by conspiracy buffs as the Babushka Lady who was at Dealey Plaza on the day Kennedy was shot. The performances, especially Costner s, are all excellent and help give the film its sense of faux authenticity.

JFK, like all successful movies, is skillfully shot (by Robert Richardson) and edited (by Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia), and wonderfully scored by multiple Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer John Williams. Using all sorts of cinematic techniques cross-cutting documentary footage with recreations using actors, flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and even the use of different film stock depending on the time period being depicted, Stone has created a truly outstanding movie-going experience that works well as a visual presentation of a complex (but mythical) narrative.

Viewed as a depiction of history, though, JFK is essentially a disillusioned American filmmaker s skewed and paranoid melange of various conspiracy theories that bank on America s post-1960s bitterness about real deception by the U.S. government vis-a-vis the conduct of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon Administration in the 1970s. (Ironically, one of the people who believed there was a conspiracy this one hatched by the Soviet Union was LBJ, one of Stone s usual suspects. )

To be fair, Stone s film doesn t claim to have proved any of Garrison or Marrs theories, and indeed, Costner s version of Garrison has his own flaws that even push some of his staffers away. And to its credit, JFK did become the catalyst for the passage of The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush and mandates that all government records still sealed be made public by 2017, the year that will mark John Kennedy s 100th birthday.

Still, Stone s assertions which are at best woolly-headed and, at worst, libelous have stained the reputation of President Lyndon Johnson, a flawed yet decent politician, as well as the Secret Service, the FBI, and even the then-still-conservative media by naming them all as willing conspirators in one of history s greatest crimes.