Parkland

After recently watching Bill O'Reilly's 'Killing Kennedy', I prefer this movie over that one. Here's why. The JFK story has no more new insights for me. The Oswalt story could be interesting, but the O'Reilly movie is rather flat.

This movie looks at the events through the eyes of all the other characters. It has things that I never heard of before. Without spoiling too much, Oswalt's mother is a pill. And I never knew of that happening in the FBI office. And I can't believe the fighting in that operating room. That's insane.

This is not a regular flowing movie. With these varied stories, it was never going to have the regular structure. It is scatter shoot storytelling. Interestingly, I found most of the stories fascinating and compelling. I wanted to know each character and their stories. And the acting was all top rate. It is the JFK assassination movie to watch.

A certain generation gained its knowledge of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Oliver Stone's JFK. Don't get me wrong, JFK remains a fine film, but there's a danger of believing the conspiracies are factual. Parkland, Peter Landesman's directorial debut, doesn't necessarily right any wrongs but it does approach the assassination with a clean slate.

Parkland unfolds the story we are all familiar with, but manages to shock thoroughly as it recounts the events of 22 November 1963 and the immediate aftermath before the conspiracy theories and thoughts of dark dealings beyond the obvious murder emerged. Landesman manages to numb us, playing our own horror and sense of helplessness across the faces of the protagonists before us as their innocence is lost and their faith in humanity is rocked.

Central to Parkland is Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), the man who inadvertently shot one of the most important 26.6 seconds of film in American history: the arrival of the President's cavalcade and his harrowing, public execution at the hands (probably) of Lee Harvey Oswald. We watch Giamatti's Zapruder evolve from confident boss to shuddering, emotional mess as he realizes just what he has recorded and the impact that footage will have on the world and his own life. It is very easy to view Zapruder as a fortunate man, a man who in a lucky half minute, shot himself fame and financial security, but Giamatti flawlessly portrays a man who just might crumple permanently under the weight and pressure from the police, the Secret Service, the press...

At every turn in Parkland there is another character recoiling in their own horror, undergoing their own life-changing trauma, and each is played with the sensitivity demanded in order for Parkland not to be a mawkish, voyeuristic experience.

After last year's The Paperboy (but overlooking the awful The Lucky One), it's definitely time to take Zac Effron seriously as an actor. As Doctor Charles 'Jim' Carrico, the young doctor called upon to put his own emotions aside and fight for the life of his President as the First Lady weeps in the corner holding a chunk of her husband's brain, he looks shell shocked and as numbed by the events as we feel.

Subtler is James Badge Dale as Robert Oswald, another man whose life is irrevocably changed by the actions of a man, who happens to be his brother. At first shocked by the shooting, he retreats into himself as realisation dawns, emerging only to castigate his deluded mother, Marguerite (Jacki Weaver), who sees an opportunity for fame and hero's honours for her youngest son.

But Parkland is such a powerful film for much more than the performances. They say the devil is in the detail and it is the minutia that kicks us in the gut the hardest. The obvious is overlooked in favour of the finer points. We never see the Zapruder film clearly or in its entirety but the sound of Jim Carrico pumping the President's chest while the gathered crowd watches silently and without hope, goes right through us. The handle of the coffin torn off as the agents lift it out of the hearse, the panic as they realise it will not fit into Air Force One, the hasty removal of the aircraft panel with saw and shoulder... They all serve to make the situation real, the horror genuine and immediate.

Landesman has created a film of morality; not just the obvious judgment towards murder, but the more difficult matters of a church burial for a man despised by the population, the suspicion thrown at the family and the blame levied at those who could have prevented the act if they had had the benefit of foresight. Parkland is an emotional journey the delivers a series of punches to leave us reeling.

Yes, we know the story, even though we may not have even breathed our first breath in 1963, but have we experienced the emotion before now?

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"This was not supposed to happen!" Dallas Texas, November 22nd 1963. President Kennedy is in town for a campaign stop and is on his way to the Dallas Trade Mart for a speech. He never makes it. While riding in his motorcade he is struck in the head by a bullet and is rushed to Parkland hospital. A staff of doctors do all they can to save his life but are unsuccessful and he becomes the 4th President to be assassinated. This is what happened next. I will start by saying that I am extremely interested in the Kennedy assassination. I have tons of books, movies and other memorabilia of the Kennedy assassination and administration. I won't bore you with what I know or even my opinion of what happened because that would distract from the review. What I will say is that this is nothing like JFK. That is one of my favorite movies ever but it is more or less an opinion and more conspiratorial. This movie doesn't really deal with the assassination head on but rather the out lying players. The movie focuses on Zapruder (Giamatti), the man who took the famous movie. Forrest Sorrels (Thornton) the head of the secret service. You also see the actions of countless medical staff, Oswald's family and the Dallas F.B.I. You see the actions of these people and how the assassination affected them rather then what all the other movies focus on. Overall, a different kind of Kennedy assassination movie. It doesn't take sides, just shows how people acted. I really enjoyed this a lot. I give it an A.

Parkland was the name of the hospital that President Kennedy was taken to after being shot in Dallas and Peter Landesman's film deals with the events of that day and the days that followed. It's a somewhat better film than the critics gave it credit for though it doesn't add anything to either the truth or the legend and prefers instead to concentrate on how the assassination affected the people on the ground, the hospital staff, the secret service agents, the Oswald family etc.

It's well cast and well played by some very talented players, (Marcia Gay Harden as a nurse, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston and David Harbour as secret service men, Paul Giametti as Abraham Zapruder, Jackie Weaver and James Badge Dale as Oswald's mother and brother; even Zac Efron as a young doctor who fails to save Kennedy's life is excellent). Landesman shoots it in a semi-documentary style which is fine though perhaps the editing is a little on the busy side; he doesn't seem to like to hold a frame for more than a few seconds at a time. I don't know, of course, how close any of this is to the facts but presumably the film was researched to within a few inches of its life and no matter how often this story has been told on screen it continues to be very moving.

Are we any closer to the truth? Has Walter Cronkite suddenly appeared on channel 4 to tell us that it was all just a close call? Did Lee Oswald have his day in court?

We are all damaged goods in the aftermath. Poor Zapruder: the horror in his face as played by Giamatti, he'd never feel pleasure in running his 8mm camera to catch his grandchildren playing. Secret Service agent Sorrells reminding all that they dropped the ball, the sense of shame he must have felt. Hosty, realizing he could have stopped it all if he had only... just ... followed through.

This isn't a time travel story showing how the past can't be changed, or an explanation of how his head travelled "back, and to the left..." Nor is it a parody, with a spit ball travelling "back, and to the left..." or a National Lampoon of the first ten thousand days of JFK.

This is as close to a documentary as could be giving us a horrible taste in our mouths how events can turn cruel, how they can be relentless and how we, those of us who were alive in those days, can be drawn back into it and the fog of remembrance is ripped away, renewed with little details.