JFK

We recommend JFK as a political thriller, with a substantial warning about taking it as history. Oliver Stone directs this investigation into an assassination with the impatience of someone who thinks the audience should already be furious. At 189 minutes, it has ample room for competing explanations, yet it keeps pushing towards certainty. The force of the filmmaking makes that pressure exciting, even when there are good reasons to question where Stone is taking us.

Kevin Costner, playing district attorney Jim Garrison, gives us someone to follow through the accumulation of names and claims. His steadiness matters: when the film becomes agitated, he holds our attention without appearing to compete with it. Stone and co-writer Zachary Sklar make the investigation feel urgent, although their determination to establish Garrison’s importance allows too little room for us to assess his judgement. Costner makes listening to lengthy explanations surprisingly watchable, which is a considerable part of his job here.

Robert Richardson’s black-and-white photography borrows the authority of documentary, and we find its apparent plainness persuasive. Editors Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing keep each new piece of information arriving before we have finished considering the last. We felt rattled by that rapid succession of images and claims. The cutting kept us anticipating another disclosure when we ought to have been examining the one already offered, and for long stretches we stopped noticing how thoroughly Stone was directing our responses.

Victor Kempster’s production design gives the courtroom scenes the institutional solidity Stone needs. The surroundings lend weight to the speeches before we have decided how much of their content to accept, and they make an effective setting for his persuasive actors. John Williams’s music adds further insistence, sometimes more than the material needs. With the dialogue and cutting already working so hard, we could do with the score applying a little less pressure.

The supporting cast helps prevent all that information from becoming exhausting. Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw, Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald and Joe Pesci as David Ferrie give the names distinct faces and temperaments. Their contrasting performances provide welcome changes of pace inside a film that rarely stops talking. Stone makes good use of the attention each actor commands, keeping us interested in the people delivering the claims as well as the claims themselves.

A conspiracy thriller can give us time to suspect everyone and test each new account. Stone gives us less of that freedom, and his screenplay with Sklar increasingly tells us how to arrange what we have heard. The courtroom speeches can be tiring when they prolong points already made by the editing. Some acknowledgement of how much remains unproved would make these passages more convincing; the confidence of the delivery cannot settle every question the film raises.

The historical doubts are serious enough to accompany any recommendation, and ours comes with them. Stone nevertheless makes a demanding procedural absorbing for much of its considerable length. We would watch it for Richardson’s photography and Scalia and Hutshing’s cutting alone. Watch it with someone who will want to argue afterwards.