Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #233 JFK (1991)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
There are certain movies that I will forever associate with the beloved 1990s cult show The Critic, chief among them Scent of a Woman and JFK. It’s hard to overstate just how huge both movies were at the time of their release.
Scent of a Woman won Al Pacino an Academy Award for one of his biggest and worst performances while JFK employed every actor in the world, lasted a grueling and sadistic ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY NINE MINUTES yet grossed a small fortune at the box office (it was the sixth top grossing film of 1991, with a box-office gross of a quarter billion dollars) and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Tommy Lee Jones. It won for Best Cinematography and Best Editing.
As is generally the case, those awards were given for MOST cinematography and MOST Editing as much as they were given for Best Cinematography and Best Editing.
Yet in the ensuing decades JFK has receded culturally along with the rest of Oliver Stone’s films from the 1980s and 1990s, as has Scent of a Woman while The Critic looms larger and larger in my mind and the public imagination with each passing year.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that The Critic manages to destroy its satirical targets in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, with perfectly aimed barbs. The Critic’s parody of JFK consists of Jay Sherman teasing a forthcoming review of the Director’s Cut of JFK with two hours of new footage.
The clip shown consists of Jim Garrison, the true-blue, All-American, impossibly idealistic and straight-shooting crusading lawyer Kevin Costner plays in JFK repeating the phrase “Back, and to the left” for nineteen seconds.
In terms of its minimalism and masterful use of repetition to an almost anti-comic extent, Jim Garrison droning “Back and to the left” OVER AND OVER AND OVER again calls to mind the rake gag in The Simpsons but with an additional element of adroit pop culture parody.
and then I said, “back, and to the lefT”
On its most literal level, the parody works because JFK’s hero does, in fact, utter the phrase “Back and to the left” an awful lot. But the micro-spoof of a major motion picture is also funny because it highlights the ridiculously didactic nature of Stone’s manic manifesto.
Stone obviously identifies with Garrison in his obsessive underdog quest for the truth about the JFK assassination and willingness to look foolish and upset powerful people. Stone clearly thinks that with JFK he is following in Garrison’s footsteps and confidently, convincingly laying out an unassailable case against the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Instead Stone comes off more like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in the famous meme where he gestures wildly at a wall filled with papers and yarn that’s supposed to reveal a sinister conspiracy but instead just illustrates that Charlie has lost his goddamn mind.
Alternately, Stone comes off like Mike Lindell ranting at perverse length about the unimaginable injustice committed against an ex-President to anyone who will listen.
To give Stone the faintest possible praise, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker’s case against everyone in the world other than Lee Harvey Oswald may be only moderately more coherent than Lindell’s paranoid ravings but he expresses his supremely questionable assertions with far more artistry than the disgraced MyPillow founder.
To give JFK a much greater compliment, the filmmakers do deserve credit, if not necessarily Academy Awards, for making a 189 minute info-dump about various conspiracy theories visually dynamic and wildly kinetic.
Stone’s ADHD visual style may be headache-inducingly excessive, overbearing and obnoxious in other contexts but his obsession with overwhelming the eye at every turn keeps a movie that’s really all talk from feeling particularly talky.
Cinematographer Robert Richardson and editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia allow us to SEE all of the crazy conspiracy theory bullshit in Stone and co-screenwriter Zachary Sklar’s script, not just hear it.
That said, the film’s overdriven sense of craftsmanship cannot hide the fact that it’s crazy conspiracy theory bullshit shamelessly posited as truth.
JFK opens with Dwight Eisenhower delivering the speech that warned the world about the danger posed by a Military-Industrial Complex concerned overwhelmingly with maintaining its own power.
Then narrator Martin Sheen spoon-feeds the audience Stone’s vision of John F. Kennedy as not just a beloved martyr and American hero but a Christ-like figure of pure benevolence on the verge of solving all of the world’s problems.
In JFK, Kennedy is presented as the ultimate Peacenik, a groovy friend to children and peace-loving people everywhere who was going to end Vietnam before it could really begin and also win the Cold War by detonating Peace Bombs all over the world, uniting the globe in peace and harmony and probably curing Cancer and taking us to Mars while he was at it.
Daddy JFK was just too good to not be killed by everyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. He would have stopped all the wars and dismantled the Military-Industrial Complex and solved the energy crisis using sustainable fuels made from unicorns and rainbows.
Because Stone sees everything in black and white he has a wildly over-inflated sense of just how heroic and powerful men like JFK and Garrison truly were.
Like every good American, Garrison is devastated by JFK’s assassination. Unlike most Americans, however, he is spurred into action by his dissatisfaction with the official story that he was killed by a lone gunmen.
this movie is actually pretty homophobic
So Garrison and his office in New Orleans begin investigating the assassination themselves and uncover a sinister cabal of cartoonish homosexual villains.
First and foremost there’s Clay Shaw, a politically connected New Orleans businessman and high roller that Tommy Lee Jones plays as broadly as a Batman villain from the 1960s: call him The Homosexual.
Then there’s a wildly over the top Kevin Bacon as a crude, homophobic caricature of a racist, tough-talking male prostitute who speaks ominously about his experiences with the “homosexual underworld” and offends our hero’s delicate sensibility by saying things like, “You a goddamn Liberal, Mr. Garrison. You don’t know shit cause you never been fucked in the ass!”
Joe Pesci passing a painful stool. Or acting, one of the two.
A perversely cast against type Joe Pesci rounds out this treacherous trio of offensive, painfully dated stereotypes as a debauched self-style “Patriot” who looks like a Dick Tracy villain and has eyebrows that take up roughly half his face.
If Garrison represents everything that’s good and honorable about our country and its citizens then the insults to the LGTBQ community that Bacon, Jones and Pesci play represents PURE HOMOSEXUAL EVIL.
Garrison, his long-suffering wife and adorable if benignly neglected children are pure light and sunshine; its killer gays are creatures of shadow and darkness, their sexuality very much linked to their over-the-top villainy.
The Quixotic lawyer files charges against Shaw for being part of a conspiracy to kill the president that reaches to the highest corridors of power, including LBJ’s White House. This conspiracy includes just about everyone, including right-wing Cubans, generals terrified that groovy hippie McLove Child JFK would end war permanently and put them all out of a job, the FBI, the American intelligence community and the American government.
Stone has flirted with the idea of adapting Atlas Shrugged for the big screen over the years. That might seem like a weird fit given Stone’s leftist politics but JFK proves that he can handle insanely preachy, exposition-heavy material and is totally fine with having a character deliver a 16 to 30 minute long monologue summing up a film’s themes and its creator’s view on the world.
The co-writer-director does that more than once here. Donald Sutherland heroically delivers a sixteen minute long speech about how the conspiracy to kill JFK essentially stretches to the very edge of the universe and beyond without making the audience want to stab pencils in their eyes.
Even more audaciously, he has Costner’s pure-hearted lawyer close out the film by spending a half hour repeating and synthesizing all of the information contained in the film’s first two and a half hours.
JFK proved predictably controversial and acclaimed at the time of its release. People wondered if it was perhaps at least a little irresponsible for a studio to spend 40 million dollars on a movie that depicts wild speculation as truth and skepticism about homophobic conspiracy theories as a deeply un-American cover-up.
Three decades on JFK seems more irresponsible than ever. QAnon and the anti-vaxx/mask movement make it damn near impossible to root for an obsessive conspiracy theorist accusing powerful people of conspiring against a president and then engaging in a massive cover-up, let alone see their actions as heroic.
JFK still looks great and moves like a freight train but a movie designed to open the eyes of a gullible and apathetic public instead head me rolling my eyes in muted disgust for roughly 189 consecutive minutes.
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