JFK

A good conspiracy thriller can be highly entertaining. I’ve mentioned before my enthusiasm for films such as Capricorn One and The Parallax View. And one of the greatest conspiracy theories in the real world concerns the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, so it’s a wonder that it’s taken me so long to get round to watching Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. But at last I’ve watched it.

The film won a couple of Oscars, and it’s notable for an excellent cast. Kevin Costner plays Garrison, an attorney who decides that JFK was victim of an establishment plot, and his performance is very powerful. His wife is played by Sissy Spacek, and other stellar names are Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland and Ed Asner. The soundtrack is written by the excellent John Williams. All very impresive.

I am not familiar with the detail of the various theories about Kennedy’s murder, and my understanding is that, although Garrison was indeed a real-life crusader for the truth about the killing, there is an element (some would say, a large element) of fiction in Stone’s version of the story.

This is a very long film indeed, and I have to admit that, despite my admiration for Costner, there were a number of times when my attention wandered. I may not know the truth about the case, but more importantly, I’m not sure that Oliver Stone does. There were moments when I did feel almost as if I were being repeatedly coshed by an angry person, determined to hammer his ideas into my head. I wasn’t anticipating such a test of endurance. Overall, JFK seemed to me to be a film with genuine merit, but by no means the masterpiece I’d hoped for. Maybe my expectations were just too high, maybe I wasn't in quite the right mood for it. But I do think that it would have appealed to me more had it been about an hour shorter.

Capricorn One

Really good conspiracy thrillers are not common. One of my favourites is The Parallax View, but I also like Capricorn One, which I’ve just watched again, after such a long gap that I’d forgotten most of the detail of the story.

The idea is very appealing. NASA is about to send a rocket to Mars for a manned landing. But just before take-off, the astronauts are taken away to a secret hideaway, although the rocket goes off into space and the watching world is led to believe that the astronauts are on board. The explanation is that, due to an equipment malfunction, the trip became unsafe, but the authorities (led by the apparently pleasant but in truth fanatical Hal Holbrook) are determined to fake a landing on the Red Planet.

Elliot Gould plays a reporter who gets wind that something is amiss with Capricorn One, and although there are various (rather sporadic, I have to say) attempts to silence him, he pursues the truth against the odds. Meanwhile, the hoax goes wrong when the rocket crashes on its return to Earth – so the astronauts (with James Brolin to the fore) have to be dispensed with. They escape, but only into the unforgiving desert.

The action sequences in the film are terrific, and Peter Hyams, the director, ensures the story moves along with gusto, so that one is inclined to forgive most if not all of the implausibilities in the plot – after all, how many thrillers are totally plausible in every respect?

One bit of trivia that intrigued me – the two stars, Gould and Brolin, have both been married to Barbra Streisand.