Peter Landesman (2013)
This wouldn’t be a good movie at any time but the film-makers might have fared commercially better if they’d not done the obvious thing – not brought it out to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination. The early October release date in the US perhaps seemed like a shrewd move – to get in quick before the welter of commemorative television documentaries on and around Friday 22 November, the very day that Parkland opened in this country, but this $10m picture has so far recouped less than a tenth of its budget at the box office. Peter Landesman’s film is very weak compared with both the main documentaries screened in Britain last month: Alistair Layzell’s One PM: Central Standard Time, which had a special showing at Curzon Soho on 11 November and appeared in a shorter version as JFK: News of a Shooting on More4 on the anniversary of the assassination; and Leslie Woodhead’s The Day Kennedy Died, broadcast on ITV on 14 November. Parkland has no clear focus or style or point of view. It purports to be about people whose lives were scarred by the day of Kennedy’s death but Landesman, who also wrote the screenplay, is in two minds about whether to concentrate on people unknown to the world before that day. You infer from the early stages that he will do this – that JFK, Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson will feature only in the inserts of news film – but Sean McGraw eventually makes a couple of brief appearances as LBJ and, after twenty minutes of editing that seems meant to ensure you never quite see her face, Jackie also becomes part of the action. Kat Steffens, who plays her, is pretty but not at all extraordinary to look at – except in terms of the amount of blood that gets caked on her clothes. I saw Parkland just a week after The Butler: the grisly decoration of the pink suit, white gloves and stockings in fictional screen accounts of the killing seems to be more crudely exaggerated with every new telling. Even so, Kat Steffens’ appearance is completely eclipsed by that of Brett Stimely, who plays JFK. Although his face isn’t clearly shown at any point, much of the rest of his body is, including his grievously injured head. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker is right to describe Parkland as tasteless in both senses of the word.
The screenplay is based on a 2007 book by Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F Kennedy, but that book, according to Wikipedia, focuses on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Landesman would have done better to be similarly selective – concentrating on perhaps three of the characters in his movie: Oswald’s brother, Robert; Abraham Zapruder; and a secret service agent called Forrest Sorrels. It’s pointless to reduce Lee Harvey Oswald (Jeremy Strong), the chief nobody who became a somebody that day, to a cameo. It’s pointless to cast Zac Efron, not much of an actor, as Jim Carrico, the young doctor at the Parkland Hospital who desperately tried to restart Kennedy’s heart: the role is sketchy and Efron looks merely to be trying to disguise his usual screen presence – he expresses nothing. It’s equally pointless to cast Marcia Gay Harden, a considerable actress, as a nurse at Parkland since the character has no context whatsoever. At the other extreme, the part of Oswald’s crazy mother is overwritten, and overplayed by Jacki Weaver. For most of the first half of Parkland, Peter Landesman is merely reconstructing the events of 22 November 1963, as if a hidden camera had recorded everything that happened, including what happened in the emergency room at Parkland. Even though the number of gory shots of the patient is excessive, the frantic activity there is the most distinctive part of the movie and, assuming that what Landesman shows is factually correct, I learned things from this that I didn’t know before – most notably, Carrico’s insistence that there is a heartbeat when he first starts working on the President.
The hospital aspect is, as the film’s title suggests, obviously central to what Peter Landesman had in mind. Kennedy’s arrival there on the Friday afternoon is followed by Oswald’s forty-eight hours later, and the differences and similarities between the hospital staff’s attempts to keep them alive are stressed. But, unless the story was told in real time, what happens at Parkland isn’t enough for a feature film and Landesman’s attempts to work the material up are crass and gratuitous. The scenes in the hospital are accompanied by James Newton Howard’s edge-of-your-seat-thriller music but we know that JFK won’t be saved. In the unlikely event of anyone not knowing that when they take their seat in the cinema, Landesman announces in legends at the start of the film that Kennedy died that day in Dallas. And all but one of the other people in the emergency room mean next to nothing to the viewer – that’s why Landesmann eventually has to make use of the sole exception, Jackie Kennedy, to bring the scene to a climax. The ‘suspense’ of getting LBJ from Parkland onto Air Force One, the staging of which seems to come out of a very routine action movie, is similarly lame. By this stage, the pseudo-documentary pretensions of Parkland have all but vanished: once the action takes a relative breather so that characters have conversations of more than a few seconds, the film turns into clichéd melodrama.
Parkland does momentarily address the issue of poor taste through Abraham Zapruder’s horror at what he’s caught on camera. He protests to the man from Life magazine (Jeffrey Schmidt) that JFK ‘was a dignified man – and this was not a dignified end …’ And Landesman does show some discretion in not showing all the frames of the film once it’s been developed in a Kodak unit at Love Field. It’s frustrating that we don’t see more of Zapruder the man, given how much Paul Giamatti gives to the role, and the same is true of Robert Oswald. This is the best acting I’ve so far seen from James Badge Dale: he’s particularly good at suggesting how mixed Robert’s feelings are when his brother is shot by Ruby. Billy Bob Thornton as Forrest Sorrels, although the role is more slender, gets across the agent’s terrible professional shame at losing ‘my man’ for the first time in a long career. But the actors are all, needless to say, upstaged by the news film. It’s not only that this is powerful however many times you see it. There’s also always something you’ve never seen before – often something no film-maker could dare to invent in a fictional drama. At Fort Worth, Kennedy is presented with a Stetson – the man who gives it to him says ‘we wanted to protect you … from the rain’. The President gracefully jokes that he’ll wear the hat ‘if you’ll come to the White House to see me in it on Monday’.
25 November 2013
