Sept. 01, 2002 - 2:22 am
another Best Picture nominee of the 1990s. i've been putting off seeing this film actually for over 4 years. i had it on a list of "movies to see" that i had saved on my computer. this is the last film on that particular list of random films, so that one gets sent to the trash now. i now have only 3 more nominees left after this one to see. part of the reason I put it off for so long is its length. 189 minutes on the Director's Cut version.
little did those of us who hadn't seen the film before know that this film is not actually about JFK at all. i thought it was going to be a biographical film and that would've been pretty good actually. no, this film is actually about a district attorney in New Orleans who decides to investigate the conspiracy theories over 3 years after JFK was killed. this is a true story, however, based on two separate novels. one of the novels was written by Jim Garrison (the lead character who is played by Kevin Costner).
highlights of this film for me were of course the unexpected appearance of Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald and the humorous name of Wayne Knight's character. everyone will most likely remember Wayne Knight from tv's Seinfeld as Newman. his character's name in this film...Numa. it basically sounds like they're saying Newman and i wouldn't have known any different if i hadn't read the list of character names. it's funny 'cause they also do the "magic bullet" reenactment (which was done in an episode of Seinfeld w/ spit instead of a bullet) and Numa takes part just as he does in the "spitter" episode.
yeah, this film really does convince you that there was some sort of conspiracy to the assassination. the theory posed by the film is that all of the major national security organizations came together in various small ways and had this performed so that the war in Vietnam would continue. they refer to it as a "coup d'etat" since Johnson was the person who could make that happen. kill the peace-loving president and put one in that will give us a war that can make money for big business. i really haven't done much research into the conspiracy, so i really don't know what to believe. i guess that's pretty much how everyone feels about this.
one of the things i really didn't like about the film (other than being bombarded with three hours of courtroom scenes, political jargon, investigations into political matters, and lots of biased, unfounded speculation) was the constant annoying conflict between Garrison and his wife (played by the usually annoying Sissy Spacek). i know that when someone gets totally enthralled in their work, their family and personal life suffers. i didn't want to see it here. it was a superficial conflict being added to an already tense film.
it's an interesting film, but not really my cup of tea. and i didn't feel like it really solved much.