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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.