Oliver Stone returns to Dealey Plaza in JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass

Before his career as a director, Oliver Stone was a scriptwriter, big on the classical roots of film storytelling. His febrile new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass finds him mining the form at its purest. A good movie must involve a tragic wrong righted by the hero. In 1991, Stone’s JFK went some way towards addressing the rip in the cosmic fabric caused by the Kennedy assassination, the film credited with helping to prompt the creation of the US Assassination Records Review Board. Under its auspices, untold documents related to the case were reviewed. In 2017, many of its own papers were declassified. Stone now duly returns to his task.

Let us leave aside the director’s modern role as smiling notary of Vladimir Putin (see The Putin Interviews) and acknowledge that his part in establishing the ARRB was more than most film-makers will ever achieve. Perhaps we can forgive too the sight of him wandering Dealey Plaza like a sorrowful lost dog. In the sections here actually concerned with ARRB documents, the film uses them to argue convincingly that the “magic bullet” with which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot Kennedy is just part of a wider pattern of disappeared evidence and implausible detail.

Stone being Stone, all is instantly conclusive. As usual too, the distinction is not always clear between declassified papers and assorted, malevolent stuff. The casual viewer might easily assume that Gerald Ford once told French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that the Warren Commission really believed the killing was a conspiracy, and that this nugget lay in official documents. (He may have done; it did not.) Journalistically, the word for Stone might as ever be “freewheeling.”

That the Kennedy autopsy saw collapses of protocol is clear. The possible roles of incompetence or panic are not considered. A sidestep duly takes us from Bethesda Naval Hospital straight to a menacing overview of government figures with dark methods and reason to welcome a new president. From here, Stone draws a line direct to America’s current unhappiness. The question of who else might be responsible for a bubbling distrust of the US is left unasked. Dealey Plaza was recently visited by QAnon devotees believing the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination would mark the return from the dead of JFK Jr. If Stone was still on site, perhaps they compared notes.

★★★☆☆

On digital platforms in the US now and

In UK cinemas from November 26 and on altitude.film and other digital platforms from November 29. On digital platforms in the US now