TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 16.8 KB | 374 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 66

Who Killed J.F.K.?


In an electrifying and troubling new film, Oliver Stone and
Kevin Costner reheat the controversy about the Kennedy
assassination

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles


    J.F.K. blown away,
    What else do I have to say?

    -- Billy Joel,
       We Didn't Start the Fire


    On Nov. 22, 1963, somebody blasted the skull of America
open. In a few seconds of rifle fire in Dallas' Dealey Plaza,
a time warp gaped. Slapped out of a pretty postwar reverie, we
screamed bloody murder.

    Oliver Stone screams bloody murder for a living. In his
screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface, he drew
nightscapes of drug paranoia and police brutality. As
writer-director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, the
Vietnam vet exorcised his demons by portraying the war as a rite
of passage -- to fratricide. In Talk Radio he suggested that the
penalty for a showman's reckless truth telling was to be killed
by his audience. Jim Morrison, in The Doors, pays a similar fee
for fame; the poet's capricious muse drives him to drugs,
madness, death. Oddly enough, Stone's tortured artistic mission
-- dispensing downers to a movie public famously addicted to
escapism -- has its upside. He pours so much dramatic juice into
the hemlock blender that folks go to his films, and official
Hollywood has rewarded Stone with three Oscars.

    This past was prologue to his most outsize challenge:
explaining the Kennedy assassination to his own satisfaction.
Or anyone else's. JFK, the electrifying melodrama opening
nationwide this week, attracted brickbats months ago when a long
article in the Washington Post cataloged historical "errors and
absurdities" in Stone and Zachary Sklar's screenplay.
Assassination scholars ragged Stone for his naivete, his use of
discredited testimony, his reliance on suspect "experts." A TIME
critic said that if Stone's film "turns out to distort history,
he may wind up doing more harm than homage to the memory of the
fallen President." Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist, has
seen the film and believes it does all that and worse. He calls
JFK "paranoid and fantastic," full of "wild assertions" and
propagating an idea that, "if widely accepted, would be
contemptuous of the very constitutional government Mr. Stone's
film purports to uphold."

    Anybody want to see this movie? Warner Bros. hopes so; the
studio (whose parent company also owns TIME) helped foot JFK's
$40 million tab. It is also counting on Kevin Costner,
America's No. 1 homegrown movie star, to lure audiences to what
is at heart a high-voltage civics quiz. Though he doesn't
necessarily agree with every notion floated in the film, Costner
is happy to play front man for Stone. "Oliver's a patriot," he
says. "And I believe with him that the impact of this movie will
be liberating. Any part of the truth -- any discussion of what
could be the truth -- can only make us freer."

    But Costner's coiled heroic presence is one more source of
controversy, for the liberal icon of Dances with Wolves and
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is playing Jim Garrison, who as
New Orleans district attorney in the late '60s prosecuted the
only Kennedy assassination case that ever went to trial. And,
quickly, out the window. The jury found the defendant,
businessman Clay Shaw, not guilty in less time than last week's
West Palm Beach jurors took to exonerate William Kennedy Smith.
For the past decade, Garrison (who appears in JFK as Chief
Justice Earl Warren) has been part of America's conspiracy
industry -- saint to some, buffoon to others.

    In Stone's mind, and in Costner's presence, the Garrison
of JFK is a hero: pure and simple. Upon learning that Lee
Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) had spent part of the summer in New
Orleans, Garrison questions people who may have known the
accused assailant: a ditsy homosexual named David Ferrie (Joe
Pesci), a hooker named Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon), a hipster
lawyer (John Candy), an alcoholic private eye (Jack Lemmon) --
a lower-depths cast whose connections seem to hint at a dark
secret. Perhaps even a conspiracy? Who dares call it treason?

    The D.A. does. A dogged sleuth for the truth, Garrison
gets tips from "X," a disaffected military man (Donald
Sutherland), help from his staff (Michael Rooker, Jay O.
Sanders, Laurie Metcalf) and static from his wife (Sissy
Spacek). By the time he has brought charges against the elegant
debauchee Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), the movie's Garrison is
convinced of the breadth and enormity of this "secret murder at
the heart of the American dream."

    So, you want to know, who killed the President and
connived in the cover-up? Everybody! High officials in the CIA,
the FBI, the Dallas constabulary, all three armed services, Big
Business and the White House. Everybody done it -- everybody but
Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, Oswald was probably a double agent
during his "defection" to the U.S.S.R., where he may have
provided information that helped the Soviets gun down Francis
Gary Powers' spy plane. He may also have been in cahoots with
anti-Castro Cubans. But he didn't shoot J.F.K.; he didn't even
shoot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. The one man charged
with the Kennedy assassination was precisely what he said he
was: "a patsy."

    Believe who will. Scoff who chooses. But save your outrage
for matters of greater moment than even a major motion picture.
It's a tribute to Stone's contentious showmanship that folks are
het up about JFK, though it is neither the first nor the last
movie assault on the Warren Commission Report. The 1973 film
Executive Action hypothesized that leaders of the
military-industrial complex conspired to kill J.F.K. A scheme
even more toxic percolated through the 1979 movie Winter Kills,
based on Richard Condon's novel: that a President very like Jack
Kennedy could be assassinated by his own father. In February
comes Ruby, from a Stephen Davis play about the man who really
did shoot Oswald. And in April, Libra, based on Don DeLillo's
fantasia about Oswald, his mother and the CIA, begins filming
under John Malkovich's direction. Earlier this year, Libra's
producers claimed that Stone had used his clout to torpedo their
production, a charge Stone heatedly denies.

    Stone should have shown more confidence in his own film.
Whatever one's suspicions about its use or abuse of the
evidence, JFK is a knockout. Part history book, part comic book,
the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours,
lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them
together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer's
complacency. Stone's picture is, in both meanings of the word,
sensational: it's tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and
breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft,
wondrously complex.

    Stone assembles and presents his material like a
brilliant, eccentric professor, dazzling you with free-form
insights even as he's poking you -- oops! -- in the eye with his
pointer. He uses a canny mix of documentary footage (including
the Zapruder film) and re-enactments in 8-mm, 16-mm and 35-mm
black-and-white and color to buttress, refute or footnote
testimony. "We didn't worry about everything not fitting," says
co-film editor Joe Hutshing. "The idea was to create a tapestry,
with various textures, grain sizes and colors."

    The film also employs clever, subtle sound effects. When,
during the first interrogation of Clay Shaw, Garrison springs
Willie O'Keefe's name, we hear a dingdong! In story terms, it
is a doorbell that cues the prostitute's appearance at Shaw's
front door (with a subtextual aural gag: the prancing stud as
Avon lady). But it also alerts the viewer that, after much
digging, Garrison has come close to pay dirt. "The sound has a
subliminal effect," Hutshing says. "It's like perfume -- it
brings you back to that period."

    In his earlier films, Stone could go bats, with prowling
cameras and screaming actors; but JFK is, for all its bravura,
compact and controlled. Perhaps no Hollywood director has made
a film with so many speaking parts or data; JFK is a crash
briefing with great visual aids. If David Ferrie mentions a
thunderstorm, Stone will lock it in your mind with a quick image
of lightning splitting the Texas sky. Throughout, Stone juggles
fact and supposition with such dervish dexterity that even when
he drops a ball, he never loses his intense poise.

    As storyteller, Stone is catering a buffet banquet of
conspiracy theories; you can gorge on them or just graze. He
tells his audience what every entertainer says: entertain this
notion. Suspend disbelief. Let's pretend. What if?
Superficially, movies are a persuasive medium because they exist
in the present tense, not the conditional. Each picture is
happening before our eyes; each Stone film fantasy is, for the
moment it is on the screen, the moviegoer's reality.

    But because films are fictions -- because even a naive
viewer knows Kevin Costner is an actor playing a moviemaker's
interpretation of a man named Jim Garrison -- the events they
portray need not be factual, or even probable; they must only
be plausible. Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK
plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder for
renewed debate. The movie recognizes that history is not only
what we are told to believe; often it is gossip that becomes
gospel.

    Does Stone see himself as a political director? "Not at
all," he says. "I am trying to be a dramatist." And a dramatist
looks for a pattern. Coincidences, random motives and the
privately festering grudges of a lone nut may be the small sad
facts behind the Kennedy assassination, but they satisfy no
one's demands -- least of all Stone's -- for the coherence of
myth. The director needs a big-picture view to make his big
picture work. And a hero like the movie's Garrison needs a
martyr like the movie's Kennedy. The President must be restored
to Camelot; the philanderer of revisionist history must be
revised again, shown in home movies as a loving husband, a
doting dad. More important, he must be a crusader who not only
is determined to achieve his noble aims but also is aware of
mortal danger from his enemies. If he was killed by Oswald
alone, then Kennedy was no martyr -- just the victim of really
rotten luck.

    Stone argues that Kennedy was so progressive, so "soft on
communism" (and on Castro) and so popular that the right-wing
establishment was driven to kill him. But this is a romantic,
perhaps fantasy, J.F.K.; he can as easily be seen as a cold
warrior with star quality. He believed in the domino theory of
communism storming across Asia; he exercised superpower machismo
by eyeballing the Soviet Union over its Cuban missiles until
Khrushchev blinked. He took flak from liberals for appointing
segregationist Southerners as judges in federal courts. Martin
Luther King Jr., not Kennedy, was the moral leader of the civil
rights movement -- rights confirmed only in Lyndon Johnson's
tenure.

    Stone's Garrison is semifictional as well, and open to
charges of distortion. As played with understated power by
Costner, in his specs and rumpled jacket, Garrison is the
ordinary decent man whose search for truth makes him
extraordinary in a time of national fear and cowardice.
Borrowing the quest plot from Hamlet (or Star Wars), JFK sends
its hero out to avenge the murder of his spiritual father, Jack
Kennedy. "This is not a biography of Jim Garrison," Costner
says. "He was just the flagpole Oliver tied the events around.
Was he right? I'm not sure. I tried to play him without judging
him. That's somebody else's job. My job was to validate him as
a character. It's up to the moviegoer to decide whether what he
says is valid."

    What wasn't valid, some supporters of conspiracy scenarios
charge, was the real Garrison's tactics. In mythologizing the
D.A., JFK ignores allegations that he bullied witnesses and
suppressed a polygraph test. These moral zits would deface the
hero's image -- and Stone's too, since he likely sees himself
as a modern movie Garrison, a brave man vilified for unearthing
the sordid, cleansing truth. If Stone wants to raise the
Garrison flagpole and sit on it, waving elaborate theories as
if they were the Stars and Stripes, fine. But he should make his
method clear to the audience. JFK needs to carry the warning:
This is a drama based on fact and conjecture.

    Under its breath, the movie says as much. It prefixes some
scenes with a "For all we know, it could have been . . ." or a
"Let's just for a moment speculate, shall we?" Stone embraces
contradictions, or maybe he just trucks over them. What Garrison
tells his staff, Stone tells his viewers: "Now we're through the
looking glass here, people. White is black, and black is white."
But the film's true epigraph might be the counsel that "X" gives
Garrison: "Don't take my word. Do your own work -- your own
thinkin'."

    "Nobody is claiming that the movie is the truth," says
Sklar, the editor of Garrison's book, On the Trail of the
Assassins. "But Oliver wanted to find out as much as he could
about the assassination and get close to the full truth, which
he, like many people, thinks has never been told."

    Stone hired Sklar to work on the script, which was also
based on Jim Marrs' study, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed
Kennedy. He boiled Sklar's 550-page first draft down to 160
pages and interpolated extensive flashbacks, in the style of
Rashomon and Z. By April 1991, when filming began, Stone, Sklar
and co-producer A. Kitman Ho had interviewed more than 200
people.

    The actors became detectives too. "It's like being a
journalist," Oldman said of his research into Oswald's
character. "We all became assassination buffs. Marina ((Oswald's
Russian-born widow)) had a tape that she let me see. It had a
section leading up to the line, `I'm just a patsy.' Oliver saw
it, and he said, `Let's restage that scene.' " Spacek spent time
with Garrison's ex-wife Liz. "The sense I got from her," the
actress says, "is of a woman living the life she wanted to live
until her husband's obsession came through. She was proud of
Jim, but his obsession went so far."

    On location in Dealey Plaza, actors and crew filmed the
motorcade re-enactment with super-8 movie cameras. "The idea,"
says co-film editor Pietro Scalia, "was to create a point of
view so that this section has an amateurish look." After much
wrangling, the JFK company secured use of the Texas School Book
Depository, from which shots were fired on Nov. 22. The sixth
floor had become a museum, so the moviemakers used the seventh
floor there and, for appropriate perspective of the motorcade,
the sixth floor of an adjacent building. Stone also filmed at
the Dallas police headquarters, where Jack Ruby killed Oswald.
"The police were very cooperative," says production designer
Victor Kempster. "They let us strip out computers in the offices
and put in 1960s furniture. That included changing doorways to
fit the film footage."

    The crucial historical footage was the Zapruder film, for
a copy of which Stone paid $40,000. "It's the most important
visual record we have of the assassination," says Sklar. "To
make a movie without it is to miss a lot." Over and over, at the
climax of JFK, Garrison plays the fatal shot -- tragedy as
therapy -- to help solve the mystery and restore the fearful
impact of the day that yanked a nation out of its cocoon of
innocence. For all its cynicism, or even paranoia, about
official venality, the film is a call for a kind of informed
innocence. Stone says: Open your eyes wide, like a child's. Look
around. See what fits. And Costner's summation is right out of
an old Frank Capra movie in its declaration of principle in the
face of murderous odds. Lost causes, as Capra's Mr. Smith said,
are the only causes worth fighting for.

    To Stone's old enemies, JFK may be another volatile brew
of megalomania and macho sentiment. To his new critics, the
film may seem deliriously irresponsible, madly muttering like
a street raver. But to readers of myriad espionage novels and
political-science fictions, in which the CIA or some other
gentlemen's cabal is always the villain, the movie's thesis will
be a familiar web spinning of high-level malevolence. JFK is
Ludlum or Le Carre, but for real.

    Or -- crucial distinction -- for reel. Memorize this
mantra, conspiracy buffs and guardians of public respectability:
JFK is only a movie. And, on its own pugnacious terms -- the
only terms Oliver Stone would ever accept -- a terrific one.