Movies TV And The Presidency: Oliver Stone's JFK (1991)

 

I'm old enough to remember just how much controversy Oliver Stone gathered in the winter of 1991 both in the leadup and immediate aftermath of his JFK.  In the years before cable news and the Internet it really did seem like you couldn't change the channel or look at any major newspaper or publication and not here some kind of excoriation of Stone.

The New York Times took exceptional offense with a series of Op Eds, starting with one labeled: "How Dare He!" This was the first film in my lifetime where no one was talking about the performances, writing or anything else but how the filmmaker should be burned in effigy – or perhaps in real life – for daring to make such a movie. To that point in cinematic history to make a film that led to so many threats on your life, you basically had to challenge religious orthodoxy as in  Martin Scorsese receiving  death threats from religious groups for his Last Temptation of Christ three years earlier.

There were many critics who could separate themselves from it: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel would both name JFK the best film of 1991 and in his first book of Great Movies JFK was in the initial list.  The movie was nominated for Best Picture and seven other Academy Awards but ended up winning just two as Silence of the Lambs became only the third film in Oscar history to win Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay.  Oliver Stone received his third Golden Globe for direction for it.

 JFK had the good fortune to come out during a period where serious movies could still do decently at the box office.  At a cost of $40 million dollars it would eventually gross 70 million at the US box office and $205 million worldwide. But it was a watershed moment for Stone's career.

Stone had been considered one of the greatest forces in Hollywood since he had written the screenplay for Alan Parker's Midnight Express in 1978. He had written superb screenplays including that of Scarface but had struggled with his own pictures until his breakthrough year of 1986 where he had back to back to critical hits Salvador and Platoon and received Oscar nominations for all three films winning Director and screenplay for the latter.

For the next four years he made movies that were both controversial, critically acclaimed and box office hits. The most successful in terms of award recognition were Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July. The previous year he'd receive acclaim for his Jim Morrison biopic The Doors.

After JFK came out he would never have a movie with the same box office or critical recognition and would only receive one more Oscar nomination for the screenplay for Nixon. There will still good films to come during the 1990s such as Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers and Nixon and after the turkey Alexander he's rarely tried to make fictional films again. Furthermore while known for his left-wing politics he'd mostly managed to keep them at the water's edge up until JFK and while he would keep that at bay in the fictional films he made (save for Money Never Sleeps the sequel to Wall Street) he increasingly focused his energy on documentary films embracing that reflected it both in regard to his version of America (Untold History of United States) and a series of documentary films in which he interview socialist dictators from Castro to Chavez all the way to Putin in the most favorable light possible and going out of his way to compare their rule favorably to what was wrong with America. To use Stone's own words JFK is where he decided to go through the looking glass when it came to keeping his politics out of the movies.

All of Stone's prestige in the industry evaporated rapidly and he quickly became a joke because of what he implied in JFK. To be fair he never seemed to take this personally and in fact played into this by cameoing as himself in Dave in which he tells Larry King that the man claiming to be President is not the same one in the photos before his heart attack.  As someone who saw and greatly loved all of his films well before this point and quite a few after, however, I find myself saddened that one of the greatest filmmakers in my lifetime became a cross between a conspiracy nut and a shill for some of the most horrible dictators in history.

It's worth noting that when I was younger I myself did have doubts about the veracity of the Warren Commission Report.. By the time I saw JFK in its entirety (I believe I was in college) I considered it a masterpiece and a true work of great filmmaking. I was more than willing to overlook its clear flaws when it came to the historical record because of the power of the images and the brilliance of Stone's direction and writing.

As I've gotten older, however, and have learned about the assassination I have increasingly come to the conclusion that Oswald did in fact act alone. There are multiple reasons for my beliefs which I will not go into directly in this article (I have in previous series and may well do again) but the biggest evidence I have is really that this was the most witnessed crime in American history and yet somehow in sixty plus years there has been no new evidence, no witnesses, no real information to contradict the findings of the Warren Commission. The only evidence we have, really, is that the government had sealed its findings for decades after the fact and much of the information to this day remains unknown. But that in itself is not evidence of a conspiracy; it might very well just be the government refusing to acknowledge its own incompetence which we've had more than enough evidence in the 20^th century to know is true.

And its worth noting, for all the brilliance of Stone's writing and direction in JFK, at the end of the movie he has done nothing to prove an alternate theory. Yes Jim Garrison has handled a prosecution of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) but in Garrison's summation he never directly implicates Shaw in his prosecution. Costner's final monologue, which essentially takes up nearly half an hour, is incredibly executed and well shot and because of that the observer might well fail to notice that it is essentially an argument that the Warren Commission is a lie and that Oswald is not guilty. He never ties it to Shaw, never ties it to anyone, really.

Indeed the longer the film goes on you see the rest of his team clearly frustrated at the way Garrison is running his case. With good reason: Garrison is a terrible prosecutor. That's not his fault (though it seems to be historically accurate). Garrison is essentially a straw man for Stone as for three plus hours he tears down everything he finds false about the official report. Costner's character essentially interviews every major actor in Hollywood alive at the time in roles against type, from John Candy to Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (never in the same scene) to Ed Asner and Joe Pesci and by the time Donald Sutherland shows up to give a long monologue you honestly wonder if Stone just asked every actor who remembered the Kennedy assassination if they wanted to appear his student film arguing that it was a conspiracy.

That's not fair either. All of these performances are great acting and you can sense the tension and power in all of them as they tear into the crisp dialogue. But it doesn't change the fact that after over 3 hours and nearly six years in screen time we are being asked to see a moment of triumph in the fact that Clay Shaw has been found not guilty after all this time and energy.

Now at the time and years later Roger Ebert would argue this wasn't the point of the film to prove anything: it was about stating in a large movie the mood of the times and what many people believed to be the truth. That's fine but this is coming from a man who indicates in his review at the time and later that he is biased in his belief that Oswald didn't act alone. If you came into the movie believing that you might well consider that Stone is 'writing history with lightning' The problem is just as with Woodrow Wilson's famous quote above in regard to Birth of a Nation, it was not terribly true. Stone has basically decided to ignore the history and write his own version of it. I could even forgive that were it not for the fact that in doing so he makes it clear he is taking the word of a bona fide conspiracy nut.

Because X, the character Donald Sutherland famously plays, is just that. L. Fletcher Prouty is the influence for X. Prouty was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy. After serving with distinction in World War II he spent much of the next decade working with the CIA and later working with the Defense Intelligence Agency. One of his colleague Edward Landsale knew him as a member of that period would say that he had 'such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff he kicked him back to the Air Force." Prouty later related a 'month or two' before the assassination he was arranged to accompany a group of VIPs to the South Pole on November 10^th to the 23^rd. In fact that happened in March of 1962.

When he retired he authored The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1992. He also served as contributing editor for a conspiracy magazine called criminal politics. By the 1980s he was being called as an expert witness to act as a consultant for the church of Scientology to defend L. Ron Hubbard's military record. That gave him access to much of Hollywood and he would serve as 'technical advisers to JFK.

Prouty would also argue that the U-2 incident was staged by the government to lead to the possibility of a summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev that might end the Cold War. And he was also a supporter of fellow conspiracy theorist Lyndon Larouche to the point when he was convicted of mail fraud, Prouty likened to the trial of Socrates.

Stone it should be noted knew this as well as the fact that Prouty was a featured speaker at the Liberty Lobby, an organization known for racist and antisemitic associations. When this was revealed Stone chose to stand by Prouty, saying it had no relevance to his source.

When you put altogether it is relatively clear that Stone's thinking is based on the writings of a man who was a full-blown conspiracy theorist who had been debunked by CIA directors and the U.S. Senate by some of his more outlandish accusations. More to the point by putting Prouty in the film (albeit by a pseudonym) he was essentially given the backing of Hollywood to credence of that conspiracy theorists unsubstantiated and unproven claims – claims I should mention that it is clear Stone still believes three decades later.

I'm not accusing Stone of laying the groundwork for the conspiracy theory culture that has now absorbed our lives its impossible to escape. JFK wasn't even the first film directly about the idea the assassination was a conspiracy in multiple films. (Hysterically three years earlier in Bull Durham Kevin Costner as Crash Davis had told Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy "I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone' as well as believe in the swell of a woman's back.) I am suggesting that from this point on he has leaned in as hard as possible to conspiracy culture that by the time  he decided to reflect these exact  claims, along with far more egregious ones,  in Untold History, it was a right wing talking point that President Obama had been born in Kenya. Stone had to be aware the damage conspiracy theories could do to our popular culture by then and nevertheless after Trump's first term out came Through the Looking Glass where Donald Sutherland essentially related in a documentary a more extreme version of the claims he'd done thirty years ago fictionally.

This brings me to another oddity. With the exception of the opening minutes of narration by Martin Sheen JFK himself is barely mentioned in the film at all. This seems somewhat odd because if you are investigating the murder of someone you have to look at his enemies. And Stone knows that were plenty of those outside of the U.S. government.  Kennedy talked about as an ideal, a symbol rather than a human being.

I find this odd because in Nixon Stone makes it very clear just how underhanded the Kennedy family could be. In the opening hour we spend a fair amount of time with Nixon's failed 1960 campaign, how they did their share of dirty tricks in campaigning and how it is very likely they stole the election in states like Illinois. The sainted Kennedy comes out looking very much like a villain in this version and that's just from a political standpoint.

By 1991 the world was all too aware of the myth of Camelot was in fact just that and how dirty the Kennedy legacy was. We knew of the affairs Jack had been having his whole life, including with Judith Campbell Exner, the mistress of Sam Giacana. We knew that Kennedy has been working with the CIA and the mob to greenlight numerous plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Pentagon Papers had even made it clear that Kennedy, for all his public talk about expansion in Vietnam, had known of the assassination Ngo Diem and done nothing to stop it and that based on the information they had they would likely have expanded the war in Vietnam had Kennedy been in office at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin.

In hindsight I can't help but wonder if this is the film JFK should have been; the kind of no holds barred biopic Stone did with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush years later. Despite his clear lefty politics he was remarkably impartial to both men in his storytelling showing the complicated figures behind the horrible policy decision they made. And Kennedy's life was far more interesting and controversial subject that his death was. Stone was the most qualified director to tell that story and I'd argue he should have told that. So the question is: why didn't he?

To me the answer might be, paradoxically, in Nixon. Late in that film Anthony Hopkins' Nixon is staring at a picture of Kennedy and says: "When they look at you, they see who they want to be. When they look at me, they see who they are." And that is as good a reason as any why in both his fictional portrayal and in all the stories he's told about Kennedy in his documentaries over the years he remains committed to the idea of Kennedy as martyr/saint. Stone, like millions of other Americans who lived during that era, needs Kennedy to be who they wanted him to be, not who he really was.

 Now one could argue that's harmless except we now live in a world where it absolutely isn't. To state the most obvious example Kennedy's nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is clearly a deep believer in the worst kinds of conspiracies imaginable, including the kinds of theories about the murders of his uncle and father that Stone advocates occurred in JFK and indeed personally believes. At this point Stone and RFK Junior could not be more diametrically opposite in their political beliefs but both are absolutely convinced in their visions of America that are far more conspiracy theory based than anything resembling reality.

I realize that I've spent more time in this article talking about the politics behind JFK itself when it comes to its creator then the actual movie. That's actually fitting considering how much of the film's reputation has to do with the controversy then its actual quality.

So I need to be clear. If you can separate yourself from the fact that this far more a film about a state of mind then a historical event or era and just appreciate the technical aspects, the performance, the directions and writing, then by any reasonable definition JFK is a masterpiece. I consider one of the five absolute classics Stone directed in his career, along with Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and Nixon. Yet unlike the other four films and indeed unlike all the other great films made in his career such as Salvador or Natural Born Killers, I can't watch it without a feeling of sorrow that has nothing to do with the subject matter or the story. Instead it has to do with Stone himself.

When Stone made his directorial debut in a forgettable horror film called The Hand many of the great wunderkinds who had started out during the 1970s such as Peter Bogdanavich and William Friedkin were on the down side of their careers and Robert Altman was apparently about the join them. (He returned at the top of his game with The Player in 1992 and never left until he died.) Francis Ford Coppola has made The Godfather III the previous year  the fifth – and last – film he made that would ever be nominated for Best Picture. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were appreciated as great filmmakers but in 1991 both were known for not being nominated for Oscars more than winning them.

 .Oliver Stone in 1989 had already won more Academy Awards for directing and writing then any of these men save for Coppola. He'd won his first Academy Award for writing Midnight Express when he was just 32.  Ten years later he'd won Best Director twice joining exclusive company. After JFK was nominated for Best Picture he was just 45 years old. His last nomination, as I said, was thirty years ago.  He did win an Emmy for producing the TV film: Indictment: The McMartin Trial in 1995 and he shared credits for involvement with Evita and The People Vs. Larry Flynt the following year but immediately after that he would be nominated for Worst Director by the Razzies twice first for U-Turn and then Alexander. He actually won a Yoga award for worst foreign film for both Alexander and World Trade Center. And those are the films he made when he wasn't increasingly making vacation movies with left-wing dictators.

When I was growing up Oliver Stone seemed to be the model for what all filmmakers should be. By the time I was in college he was becoming a cautionary tale for what happens when you go down a rabbit hole and by the time I started doing criticism for all intents and purposes he'd given up moviemaking for being a conspiracy theorist for the left. It's one thing to here about someone getting lost down a rabbit hole of theories. It's another to see a great director getting lost in his own narrative. Before JFK Stone had managed to keep his politics out of his films. It's sad to see that when it came to choosing between the two, he decided to embrace politics fully instead.