JFK

JFK (1991) is about a prosecutor challenging the official account of the Kennedy assassination, and it led to an actual law. Jim Garrison is the district attorney in New Orleans. He reads the Warren Commission report and finds inconsistencies. He opens his own investigation and prosecutes a New Orleans businessman for involvement in the assassination. It remains the only criminal trial ever brought over Kennedy's death, and the defendant was acquitted. The film follows Garrison's case: there was no lone gunman, the killing was a state operation, and the reason was Vietnam. The form is its greatest strength. Stone mixes 35mm, 16mm, black and white, video and genuine archive; the reconstructions are shot to match the texture of the archive and what is document and what is invention is deliberately blurred. That choice is both the film's power and its largest problem. Historians and journalists objected sharply: it presents unproven claims as evidence and does not show how weak the real Garrison case was. But the consequence is measurable. The film created substantial public pressure and Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992. It required the National Archives to assemble all records relating to the assassination and created a board to accelerate declassification. That board stated in its own records that the film contributed to the law being passed. A film of contested historical accuracy caused the archives to be opened. Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman and Donald Sutherland are in the cast. It runs 189 minutes. Good for: political thrillers, editing technique, and American history. Less good for: it is long, dense with information, and part of what it asserts is unproven.