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JFK The film is about the investigations into the murder of President Kennedy. The central character is based on Jim Garrison, former District Attorney of New Orleans, who brought the only criminal investigation connected to the assassination to trial.
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The Reviews Vietnam haunts Oliver Stone, who served there. That was clear enough in Platoon, which, faults and all, is the most scorching combat film about that war, and in Born on the Fourth of July, about a maimed survivor. For me, Stone's Vietnam experience is what lies behind JFK (Warner Bros.). In most of the plentiful comment about the picture, the implication has been that Stone wanted to make a film about John Kennedy's assassination and that, out of the many explanations of the crime, he chose a questionable one. This is backward, I'd say. I think he made this film because Jim Garrison's theory contends that Kennedy wanted it to grow. Vietnam is what led Stone to Kennedy: he felt that the anti-Kennedy conspirators ultimately caused the Asian hell that he saw. To criticize the details of Mr. Stone's "theory" misses why it is so seductive. The barely stated premise of JFK is that the assassination of Kennedy was a historical watershed. Had he not been killed, everything would have been different. No Vietnam. No race riots. No drug culture. Instead, Camelot. It is a view Mr. Stone has expressed again and again in interviews. It is also a view shared, more or less consciously, by millions of Americans. If the assassination changed so much, the argument continues, it seems all the more implausible that it could have been the work of a lonely fool like Oswald; an event so big surely deserves a big villain, such as the military-industrial complex. A film such as this has special responsibilities, which I don't mean to ignore; but first a word about something that its detractors tend to scant--JFK itself. The film is a whirlwind, a torrent. Its fierce main current, the Garrison story, sweeps along with attendant swirls and eddies. Stone keeps that story--and its references and hypotheses--as visible as possible, aiming at increased clarity rather than pyrotechnics, yet it is virtuoso work. He mixes actualities, like bits of the Zapruder film, with seeming actualities in color or in grainy black and white. (Objectors to this method presumably would have had him label his own work "simulation." A more appropriate label, if one is needed,would "speculation.") Throughout the cascading film I kept wanting to see more, more, more--and it runs three hours. (It happened both times I saw JFK.) The whole situation resolves, for me, to a state of tension among five elements. First, JFK is a fine piece of film-making. Second, it is a passionate work in an art that is mostly treated as an industry. Third, it distorts facts in the assassination theory it presents. Fourth, it strongly underscores our incomplete knowledge about the assassination and possible conspiracy. (Let's all check this in 2029.) Fifth, although the proof that Kennedy was killed because of the war is very slim, the film is one more outcry against the waste and horror of Vietnam. As with a prism, we can rotate this set of elements so that we are looking at only one of them at a time. But even while we are looking at only one of them, all the other elements are true. Robert Brustein The New Republic, Jan 27, 1992
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