http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020429/REVIEWS08/204290301/1023JFK:
"I don't have the slightest idea whether Oliver Stone knows who killed President John F. Kennedy. I have no opinion on the factual accuracy of his 1991 film "JFK.'' I don't think that's the point. This is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings. "JFK'' accurately reflects our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963. We feel the whole truth has not been told, that more than one shooter was involved, that somehow maybe the CIA, the FBI, Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia or the Russians, or all of the above, were involved. We don't know how. That's just how we feel.
Shortly after the film was released, I ran into Walter Cronkite and received a tongue-lashing, aimed at myself and my colleagues who had praised "JFK.'' There was not, he said, a shred of truth in it. It was a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. It did not reflect the most elementary principles of good journalism. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.
I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that "JFK'' is no more, or less, factual than Stone's "Nixon''_or "Gandhi,'' "Lawrence of Arabia,'' "Gladiator,'' "Amistad,'' "Out of Africa,'' "My Dog Skip'' or any other movie based on "real life.'' All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.
Given that standard, "JFK'' is a masterpiece. It's like a collage of all the books and articles, documentaries and TV shows, scholarly debates and conspiracy theories since 1963. We know the litany by heart: The grassy knoll, the hobos in dress shoes, the parade route, the Bay of Pigs, Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia, the two Oswalds, Clay Shaw, Allen Dulles, three shots in 2.6 seconds, the eyewitness testimony, the woman with the umbrella, the gunpowder tests, the palm print, Jack Ruby, the Military Industrial Complex, the wrong shadows on the photograph, the Zapruder film, and on and on. These items are like pegs on a child's workbench: We pound one down, and another one springs up.
Oliver Stone was born to make this movie. He is a filmmaker of feverish energy and limitless technical skills, able to assemble a bewildering array of facts and fancies and compose them into a film without getting bogged down. His secret is that he doesn't intend us to remember all his pieces and fit them together and arrive at logical conclusions. His film is not about the case assembled by his hero, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). It is about Garrison's obsession. The film's thrust is not toward truth, but toward frustration and anger. Too many lies have been told and too much evidence tainted for the truth to ever be known. All Garrison can reasonably hope to prove is that the official version is unlikely or impossible, and that tantalizing clues and connections suggest a hidden level on which the dots connect differently.
Stone was much criticized for choosing Garrison as his hero. Who should he have chosen? Earl Warren? Allen Dulles? Walter Cronkite? As a filmmaker, it is his assignment to find a protagonist who reflects his feelings. Jim Garrison may not have been on the right track, but he was a perfect surrogate for our national doubts. He asked questions that have never been satisfactorily answered -- that can have no answers, and indeed cannot even be questions, if the Warren Report orthodoxy is correct. Jim Garrison was the obvious hero for any film about a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy."
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http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19951220/REVIEWS/512200302/1023NIXON:
"Oliver Stone's "Nixon" gives us a brooding, brilliant, tortured man, sinking into the gloom of a White House under siege, haunted by the ghosts of his past. Thoughts of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear come to mind; here, again, is a ruler destroyed by his fatal flaws.
There's something almost majestic about the process: As Nixon goes down in this film, there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship sinking.
The movie does not apologize for Nixon, and holds him accountable for the disgrace he brought to the presidency. But it is not without compassion for this devious and complex man, and I felt a certain empathy: There, but for the grace of God, go we. I rather expected Stone, the maker of "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers," to adopt a scorched-earth policy toward Nixon, but instead he blames not only Nixon's own character flaws but also the Imperial Presidency itself, the system that, once set in motion, behaves with a mindlessness of its own.
In the title role, Anthony Hopkins looks and sounds only generally like the 37th president. This is not an impersonation; Hopkins gives us a deep, resonant performance that creates a man instead of imitating an image. Stone uses the same approach, reining in his stylistic exuberance and yet giving himself the freedom to use flashbacks, newsreels, broadcast voices, montage and the device of clouds swiftly fleeing over the White House sky as events run ahead of the president's ability to control them.
"Nixon" is flavored by the greatest biography in American film history, "Citizen Kane." There are several quotes, such as the opening upward pan from outside the White House fence, the gothic music on a cloudy night, the "March of Time"-style newsreel, and the scene where the president and Mrs. Nixon sit separated by a long dinner table. The key device that Stone has borrowed is the notion of "Rosebud," the missing piece of information that might explain a man's life.
In Stone's view, the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap on the White House tapes symbolizes a dark hole inside the president's soul, a secret that Nixon hints at but never reveals. What is implied is that somehow a secret CIA operation against Cuba, started with Nixon's knowledge during the last years of the Eisenhower administration, turned on itself and somehow led to the assassination of
John F.Kennedy.
The movie doesn't suggest that Nixon ordered or desired Kennedy's death, but that he half-understood the process by which the "Beast," as he called the secret government apparatus, led to the assassination. Learning that former CIA Cuba conspirator E. Howard Hunt was involved in the Watergate caper, he murmurs, "He's the darkness reaching out for the dark. Open up that scab, you uncover a lot of pus." And in an unguarded moment, he confides to an aide, "Whoever killed Kennedy came from this thing we created - this Beast." If the 18 1/2-minute gap conceals Rosebud, it is like the Rosebud in "Kane," explaining nothing, but pointing to a painful hole in the hero's psyche, created in childhood. "Nixon" shows the president's awkward, unhappy early years, as two brothers die, and his strict Quaker parents fill him with a sense of purpose and inadequacy. "When you quit struggling, they've beaten you," his father says. And his mother (Mary Steenburgen), speaking in the Quaker tradition of thees and thous, seems always to hold him to a higher standard than he can hope to reach."
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