The film uses the chaos as its driving force, setting a brisk pace as it cuts between news footage from the time and all the ancillary actions and reactions triggered by the shooting.
The book is dense with detail as it parses through thousands of observations and endless small decisions made over the course of those days.Įchoing Bugliosi’s minute-by-minute structure, the film is forever shifting between people and points of view as it pares down and follows the timeline of the most critical threads: the morning in Fort Worth, the mid-day flight to Dallas, the motorcade, the shooting, the hospital turmoil, the president’s death in the emergency room, the news coverage, the competing investigations, the Zapruder film of the shooting, the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooting of the shooter, his death, the burials, one in Washington, one in Texas, on the same final day.
MARCIA GAY HARDEN INTERVIEW PARKLAND MOVIE
The writer-director digs deeply and with a marked sensitivity, capturing the desperate, heartbroken humanity of the time and the place.īut it is also a movie of frustrating stumbles - blunders that diminish what might have been a brilliant film.īased on “Four Days in November,” author Vincent Bugliosi’s riveting, “Rashomon"-like dissection of the assassination, it was an ambitious undertaking to begin with. It is the way in which ordinary acts began to define an extraordinary moment in history, and the residue of regret that would stay with the city, that Peter Landesman’s new film seeks to mine. This unsettling film zeros in on the initial impact - just four days - for those closest to the president, for the many ordinary people of Dallas who became involved, and for a city that would begin to wear the assassination of John F. 22, 1963, when a president was shot, a country was wounded and a city was brought to its knees. This review was originally published on 15 October, 2013 as part of our London Film Festival coverage.“Parkland” hangs on a split second on Nov. There was plenty to ‘work with’ here, so it’s disappointing that his offering turns out to be little more than one long funeral procession. As Zac Efron mounts the corpse of America’s fallen hero to perform CPR, thrusting up and down on Kennedy’s chest like a bearded child pumping up a paddling pool, a doctor turns to him and states “Boy, you’ve got nothing to work with.” But that’s not quite the case for Landesman. Ironically, for a film that discusses the importance of dignity – particularly in relation to the press not publishing the image of the fatal ‘kill shot’ – Parkland sometimes forgets to apply this philosophy to its own interpretation of events.
From Giamatti’s four-day crying episode to the film’s attempts to rewrite history and heighten the tension of the operating room as all the kings horse and all the kings men attempt to put poor Jacky back together again, Parkland is little more than the audible whimper of a people ruminating over a great tragedy. This ‘touchy-feely’ account of the assassination’s direct repercussions relies far too heavily on conjuncture and emotive language to swaddle its sugar-sack of national grief in a warm and comforting embrace that seems unlikely to travel well outside of the States. The assassination is evaluated by the trauma it bestowed on those poor souls present at the time, far more concerned with propagating the myth surrounding Kennedy’s lasting legacy than exposing his country’s proceeding loss of innocence.
MARCIA GAY HARDEN INTERVIEW PARKLAND ARCHIVE
High production values and set designs coalesce with archive footage to impart this serviceable, yet belligerently patriotic snapshot of events. Equipped with a stellar cast that includes Paul Giamatti, Marcia Gay Harden and Billy Bob Thornton, we witness the trauma inflicted on an eclectic selection of individuals ranging from Kennedy’s aids and the staff of Parkland hospital to the family of Lee Harvey Oswald – the man arrested, and later killed himself, for the President’s murder.