Parkland earnest but never finds a groove
Movie relives JFK assassination through a variety of plot lines
REVIEW
Parkland ★★ (out of five) Starring: Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron, Billy Bob Thornton, James Badge Dale, Colin Hanks, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver Directed by: Peter Landesman Running time: 94 minutes Parental guidance: PG, coarse language, disturbing content Playing at: North Edmonton Nearly 50 years later, it feels like we’ve covered every angle of the tragedy that reshaped American politics. From Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-heavy JFK to John Mackenzie’s police procedural Ruby (not to mention countless news specials and documentaries), the November 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy is probably the most picked-over event in modern history.
We can’t get enough of the Camelot yarn because it recalls a time when America was still innocent. Before Nixon and Watergate, people still believed in the integrity, honesty and courage of elected officials.
Now, not so much. Something died inside the American soul when shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, which explains why Peter Landesman’s new movie Parkland feels like a very long, tedious, plotless episode of CSI.
Cast under a pall of cadaver yellow, the movie takes us back to Dallas on that fateful November day via a variety of plot lines.
We watch Abra ha m Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) tell employees at his ladies-wear company to take a long lunch to watch the president drive by. We see Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother Robert (James Badge Dale) spend his day at the office and we watch two young surgical residents (Colin Hanks and Zac Efron) attend to the most powerful man on the planet at Parkland general hospital.
For Landesman to name the movie after the place where both Kennedy and Oswald were pronounced dead is a convenient way of mashing the two narratives together, but it also explains why Parkland feels like it’s wrestling with itself.
This movie never finds a groove. One minute, we’re transported into the operating room watching Efron and Hanks and Marcia Gay Harden struggle to maintain their composure under incredible pressure. The very next, we’re treated to complete craziness in cat-eye glasses as Jacki Weaver plays the nutty mother to Lee Harvey Oswald.
First-time director Landesman tries to unite these ricocheting elements through his wet blanket of tone, but if anything, the earnest style drains the film of any levity or emotional edginess, and turns every scene into a blunt instrument.
He tries to relive the assassination so we can get a sense of the dislocation the characters are trapped in — whether it’s the secret service bodyguards who failed to do their jobs, or even JFK’s wife Jackie herself (Kat Steffens), who walks around the hospital in shock, clutching a bloody chunk of the president’s skull and scalp.
Landesman deserves some credit for trying to conjure this abstract dimension of loss, but all he really does is make a movie on Prozac.
For the actors, the lack of a strong tether leaves them drifting in space and lends a sense of the ridiculous to the whole affair.
Giamatti is by far the most complete character in the role of Zapruder, the man who filmed the assassination and later sold the images to Life Magazine. A veteran at playing the layered Everyman, Giamatti provides the audience’s only accessible touchstone because he’s the prime witness — the man who saw it all — and now bears a weight of responsibility.
We care about Zapruder even if we know where his film eventually ends up. Moreover, the story of the film itself is fascinating to explore in the modern era because it points to the seismic shifts that have taken place since. Zapruder was allowed to keep his camera and film. Individual rights and privacy still trumped national security, and that’s probably the most interesting thing in this dreary, self-important piece of pop history. Because where most scenes feel overcooked, this one angle on lost innocence still feels raw.