Overblown Conspiracy

I've always had some curiosity about the movie JFK. Mostly, it came down to this -- what could have been so phenomenal about it to have attracted such a cast to be in it? The enormous roster of supporting and minor characters is portrayed by Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Kevin Bacon, Sissy Spacek, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, John Candy, Donald Sutherland, John Larroquette, and Walter Matthau. The opening narration is by Martin Sheen. And you might well also know actors Brian Doyle-Murray, Wayne Knight, Michael Rooker, and Bob Gunton.

But I must confess, now that I've seen it, I fail to see what drew in all the "big fish." This is an indulgent mess. Director Oliver Stone is flinging paint all over an enormous canvas (three-and-a-half hours long, in his "Director's Cut"), just trying to see what, if anything, will stick. The movie plays like some kind of mini-series all cut together in a single, long format. This 40 minutes' worth of it could play as an episode about one conspiracy theory. The next 40 minutes tries to examine possible motivations of one or two characters in greater detail. The next 40 minutes whips over to yet another collection of ideas, untethered to anything that precedes or follows it. And so on. And on. And on. And the longer it goes, the more self-important it gets as it piles on Shakespearean references, unrealistic courtroom grandstanding, and more.

The movie is further hurt by Kevin Costner playing the lead. Once again, as in so many of his movies, he's the weak link, the actor with a narrow-to-non-existent range that simply stands there as a wall for all the other performers to bounce a ball against. No one else gets even close to half the screen time he does, so he must carry the movie. And he's incapable of doing so. He's just too vanilla, too boring, to make his character's story at all engaging. This entire collection of assassination theories would truly have been more engaging if presented simply as a documentary mini-series, without trying to present it as drama.

The only thing that saves the movie from being a total loss is that epic secondary cast I spoke of. It's a real shame none of them gets a lot of screen time, because there's a lot of fine work here. Kevin Bacon was almost "auditioning" here for the darker roles he would soon begin to play -- he proved to be just as good at them as the parts he'd typically played to this point. Tommy Lee Jones avoids pitfalls of caricature to present a rounded character. Gary Oldman manages an enigmatic performance as Lee Harvey Oswald that still seems full. And so on, right down the list. They're all fantastic.

Still, the good work is probably not so good as to sit through and sift through the rest. Overall, I'd call the movie a C-.