The questions that everyone raises about Oliver Stone's JFK is whether the choice to make the controversial District Attorney Jim Garrison the protagonist/hero of the piece. A cursory glance at even the Wikipedia article about Garrison shows a career full of controversy, his investigation of the Kennedy assassination only the most known.

Kevin Costner plays Garrison who is presented as Mr. Average Man of the new South going through at this time the catharsis of the social change the Civil Rights Era wrought. A couple names known to him surface in reports about the assassination and Garrison starts his own probe. It brings him the most controversy in a controversial career and nearly wrecks his domestic situation as wife Sissy Spacek threatens to leave and take the kids.

The most flamboyant performance in the film is that of Joe Pesci as David Faerie who was the linchpin of Garrison's case. He was the link to the late Lee Harvey Oswald and the collection of folks that Garrison eventually indicted. Remember all the action in the film ended in 1969 a few months before the Stonewall Rebellion. We're introduced in this case to a bunch of gay conservatives, in fact they're downright reactionary. Faerie is a pilot and part of the underground gay culture that New Orleans had. Today it's a lot more open I assure you. Today this bunch would be Log Cabin Republicans.

The group is headed by Tommy Lee Jones playing Clay Shaw who since just about everyone in the Sixties was in the closet, Jones ruled the gay closet in New Orleans at the time. Unlike Faerie or Kevin Bacon who plays a favorite boy toy of the clique and who get busted in bar raids regularly, Jones is rich enough to be above all that. I'm surprised he didn't retain Roy Cohn as an attorney although he probably figured a New York Jew wouldn't go over big in a New Orleans court.

At the time Oliver Stone got pilloried for delving on the gay aspect of the conspirators. That was an error, these guys were what they were. Whether Garrison was really on to something is a whole other matter which we may never know until everything about the Kennedy assassination is declassified.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are in this and it is on the list of their collaborative work although they have no scenes together. Matthau has a scene on an airplane with Costner and Matthau plays Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana, son of a man who was assassinated himself. He's most skeptical about the Warren Report. Lemmon plays a gumshoe operative working for Edward Asner playing Guy Bannister who was linked to Shaw. He was a nasty, brutal, reactionary drunk and gets into it with Lemmon on the day of the assassination in flashback. Lemmon gives Costner some leads in the right direction.

JFK is a film that provides a view of the Kennedy assassination, but good as it is should be taken with a grain of salt.

Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is the Louisiana DA in New Orleans. On November 22, 1963, president John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested and then shot by Jack Ruby. Garrison is not convinced and conducts his own investigation. He uncovers a web of strange and mysterious characters.

Director Oliver Stone is a brilliant filmmaker who uses all his skills to weave his own tale about one of the most important event in history. It is the highest of conspiracy theory all dressed in glitz and believability. The problem is that the movie is so well made that some in the audience may actually believe it. It's all spin and innuendo. Oliver Stone puts out all these questionable facts and lets the audience walk right over the edge. He even has one of the most convincing re-enactment during the trial as Kevin Costner recounts the events. It is a masterpiece. He's got quite a few good actors put in some fascinating work. In the end, it treats these tales as truths and history loses out.

It's always enjoyable to watch a writer/director undertaking a real labour of love, and it's clear that the subject of the JFK assassination is a real obsession of Oliver Stone's. His resultant film, which sometimes feels very artificial somehow, is basically an excuse for him to fit together every conspiracy theory and idea surrounding the shooting and put them into one unwieldy, ultra-lengthy movie.

JFK is a film that works on details and there are plenty of them here, most coming in during a couple of bum-numbing monologues by Kevin Costner and Donald Sutherland. None of it is particularly cinematic, and you wonder if a documentary might have got Stone's points across in a more sensible way, but somehow it all works and gels together. Costner has never been better than when he plays it straight, and his obsessive investigator brings to mind Jake Gyllenhaal's equally obsessed reporter in another true story, ZODIAC.

One thing that I found rather amusing is Stone's casting of famous faces in small roles, some of them blink-and-you'll-miss-'em. Gary Oldman is barely here, and there are even briefer turns from the likes of Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, John Candy, and Kevin Bacon. Michael Rooker and Tommy Lee Jones both have meatier roles before they became familiar faces, both are cast against type and both are effective with it.