‘JFK’: Oliver Stone’s Emotionally Accurate and Masterfully Crafted Trip Down the Rabbit Hole

“… There is literally zero doubt about it—director Oliver Stone has always been drawn to making movies about significant men who were creators, conquerors or critics, i.e. free thinkers, whether it be king Alexander the Great, president Richard Nixon, fictional Wall Streeter Gordon Gekko or New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who investigated the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. Stone’s film about the latter, entitled ‘JFK’, was met with critical acclaim and went on to become a huge box office success upon its original release in 1991. … But despite its box office success and artistic acclaim, ‘JFK’ was generally met with outrage even before it hit movie theaters—George Will of The Washington Post wrote a piece in which he stated that the movie was ‘a three-hour lie’ and claimed Stone ‘may be an intellectual sociopath,’ all the while basing his writing solely on a leaked copy of the script’s first draft. Newsweek did a cover story entitled Why Oliver Stone’s New Movie Can’t Be Trusted, The Chicago Tribune wrote that the film is ‘full of distortions and outright falsehoods,’ whereas sitting Chief Executive of the Motion Picture Association, Jack Valenti, compared ‘JFK’ to Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), a 1935 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. … Speculation surrounding the death of the USA’s 35th president had been prominent ever since his assassination on November 2, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. This speculation has grown over the decades and has created a special kind of rift in the USA—one between those who believed the official story of there being a sole gunman (as concluded by the Warren Commission) and those who were convinced that there was more than one shooter, implying a conspiracy. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison belonged to the latter category, which resulted in him and his team being responsible for the first trial that related to Kennedy’s assassination, taking place in 1969. …”
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