Oliver Stone: Who Killed J.F.K.?

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Stone assembles and presents his material like a brilliant, eccentric professor, dazzling you with free-form insights even as he's poking you -- oops! -- in the eye with his pointer. He uses a canny mix of documentary footage (including the Zapruder film) and re-enactments in 8-mm, 16-mm and 35- mm black-and-white and color to buttress, refute or footnote testimony. "We didn't worry about everything not fitting," says co-film editor Joe Hutshing. "The idea was to create a tapestry, with various textures, grain sizes and colors."

The film also employs clever, subtle sound effects. When, during the first interrogation of Clay Shaw, Garrison springs Willie O'Keefe's name, we hear a dingdong! In story terms, it is a doorbell that cues the prostitute's . appearance at Shaw's front door (with a subtextual aural gag: the prancing stud as Avon lady). But it also alerts the viewer that, after much digging, Garrison has come close to pay dirt. "The sound has a subliminal effect," Hutshing says. "It's like perfume -- it brings you back to that period."

In his earlier films, Stone could go bats, with prowling cameras and screaming actors; but JFK is, for all its bravura, compact and controlled. Perhaps no Hollywood director has made a film with so many speaking parts or data; JFK is a crash briefing with great visual aids. If David Ferrie mentions a thunderstorm, Stone will lock it in your mind with a quick image of lightning splitting the Texas sky. Throughout, Stone juggles fact and supposition with such dervish dexterity that even when he drops a ball, he never loses his intense poise.

As storyteller, Stone is catering a buffet banquet of conspiracy theories; you can gorge on them or just graze. He tells his audience what every entertainer says: entertain this notion. Suspend disbelief. Let's pretend. What if? Superficially, movies are a persuasive medium because they exist in the present tense, not the conditional. Each picture is happening before our eyes; each Stone film fantasy is, for the moment it is on the screen, the moviegoer's reality.

But because films are fictions -- because even a naive viewer knows Kevin Costner is an actor playing a moviemaker's interpretation of a man named Jim Garrison -- the events they portray need not be factual, or even probable; they must only be plausible. Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder for renewed debate. The movie recognizes that history is not only what we are told to believe; often it is gossip that becomes gospel.