‘JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass’: Oliver Stone Attempts A Weak Victory Lap In The Receptive-To-Conspiracy Age [Cannes Review]

Conspiracy theorists have spent more time researching their subjects than you have and have facts ready at their disposable with which to bury you in. Take filmmaker Oliver Stone, for example. Spend three hours with his 1991 epic “JFK,” or two more with his new nonfiction recap of the same material, and you’re bound to come away thinking he Makes Some Points. However, without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work. And without the brio of Stone’s highbrow-Sam Fuller imperial-phase filmmaking chops, it’s merely a wan appendix.

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In “JFK,” New Orleans, D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) tilted quixotically at the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President Kennedy, culminating in a thirty-minute–plus courtroom scene taking issue with the official story’s interpretation of the autopsy and ballistic evidence and imploring the jury to pierce the veil of government obfuscation and find that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. It was a big enough deal that it hastened the declassification of millions of pages of records years ahead of schedule, under the aegis of the Assassination Records Review Board. “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” which refers back to the 1991 film throughout, ostensibly exists to take a look at the new shit that has come to light since 1991. But most of the key points will already be familiar—some of them are repeated almost word-for-word—and much of what’s new serves to confuse rather than clarify the relatively clear thesis of the fiction feature.

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Stone interviews several JFKologists, authors, and scholars with onscreen text, confidently identifying some of his key forensics and ballistics experts as a radiation oncologist and an ophthalmologist. (Still, better an ophthalmologist than an anti-vaxxer—Stone gives shameful camera time to self-aggrandizing wackjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who shows up to burnish his family’s reputation and thus his own celebrity, in a hammy near-tears rasp.) So many of the supposedly telling facts about the chain of evidence of the assassin’s bullet, the muddled autopsy protocol, conflicted eyewitness testimony, even the weight of Kennedy’s brain, are treated as damning, rather than as minor inconsistencies most easily explained as the natural consequences of confusion, trauma, bureaucratic sloppiness, the limits of forensic science in the early 1960s, and the unreliability of memory. Everything is treated as ambiently suspicious and therefore significant. (Don’t you see?!? Don’t you see?!?) In the absence of an articulated, coherent alternate theory that could explain any of the physical and eyewitness testimony better than Oswald, Alone, Occam’s razor slices the whole first half of the film to bits. Vast and far-reaching government conspiracy is meant to be seen intervening decisively in every mislabeled photograph.

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Even without the benefit of a pause button to check Wikipedia to see which facts Stone has omitted, his sleight-of-hand is obvious. A bullet the voiceover claims was undamaged is clearly deformed in its tip when seen in a frontal view, and for all that Stone dogs the Warren Commission report as a whitewash meant to cover up the CIA’s role in the assassination, it sure is odd that he immediately accepts its conclusion that one of the three shots fired from the Book Depository missed the presidential limo. Stone indicts the Warren Commission report for its preordained conclusions but treats its every imperfection as definite evidence of his own preferred narrative.

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Stone rides on the coattails of “JFK,” buttressing the documentary with clips from the fiction film, showing a portion of Donald Sutherland’s amazing act-break cameo as a Deep State Deep Throat who lays out the military-industrial complex for Garrison, and enlists the actor to narrate as the film pivots, as “JFK” did on Sutherland, from The Who to the Why. The Who is never really answered—Stone zooms out from the “JFK” decadent gay cabal, and its suggestion that a bewigged Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones concocted the Kennedy assassination in between snorts of poppers—but Stone basically suggests that it was Them. You know… Them. In archival clips, CIA head and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles is always puffing on his pipe like a figure in an Agatha Christie whodunnit. 

The voiceover narration, which Stone shares with Sutherland and Whoopi Goldberg, repeatedly calls Kennedy a “progressive” at odds with the Cold Warrior Dulles. To establish Kennedy’s anti-imperialist bona-fides, Stone includes a clip from his inauguration speech—“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny”—which was actually an explicit warning to new Third World states to not align with the Soviets. The implication that the CIA wanted Kennedy out of the way so that the military-industrial complex had a clear path into full-scale war in Vietnam is simply not borne out by the nuance and evolving, but interventionist Vietnam policy Kennedy was pursuing at the time of his assassination. It’s one thing for Stone to implicate the CIA in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (go off, king). But the sentimentality Stone shows in building up Kennedy into an almost messianic messenger of peace, another carryover from “JFK,” feels more like “Field of Dreams” than Adam Curtis, a Boomer’s lament for a fallen father figure and the end of innocence.

The thing is, Stone has already won this debate. “JFK,” which made over $200 million in 1991 money and was nominated for eight Oscars, is the key source text for Oswald skepticism, a position held by three out of every five Americans. “Back and to the left,” the Magic Bullet, the Grassy Knoll—all of that is “JFK.” Most Americans believe that the Kennedy assassination comes from either the Warren Commission report or Oliver Stone. It’s an enormously entertaining and compelling piece of Hollywood agitprop, and it changed the course of history in the direction that its maker intended.

So why make this documentary now? To the extent that “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” has a reason to exist, it’s to make space for Stone’s JFK crusading in a contemporary political sphere that’s much more receptive to conspiracy theory. “JFK” is accurate and ahead of its time in foregrounding the role of the American intelligence services in foreign assassinations and front groups. (It’s very good on Oswald’s ties to the CIA and the general shadiness and unpredictability of the world of intelligence contractors and sources.) Stone, who made an Edward Snowden biopic and almost certainly subscribes to Glenn Greenwald’s Substack, clearly has something to get off his chest about the Deep State. His long-established suspicion of the American intelligence community resonates with both the current hard left and right wings of American politics. But rather than trace the parallels from Vietnam to the current unwinnable war in the Middle East and the wrangling between the executive branch and career military that has plagued the last three presidential administrations, Stone pulls his punches in the Discourse Wars. Modern-day parallels in “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” are so vague that viewers might think Stone is condemning Donald Trump—even though he’s said in interviews that he thinks the mainstream media’s fixation on Trump is largely a distraction from an ongoing malevolent project at odds with any sunnily idealistic view of American foreign policy. He leaves his audience simply with a general admonition not to trust their government. This is just replacing one unquestioned dogma with another—out with naivete and in with nihilism. [C+]

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