'Parkland' Movie Review - Billy Bob Thornton and Paul Giamatti  | Movie Reviews Site

Billy Bob Thornton and Paul Giamatti

"Parkland" Movie Review: 2 Stars

by Michael Phillips

We may never know who really was involved in the killing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But the opposite poles of the existing theories, cinematic division, stand in clear and livid disagreement.

Oliver Stone in "JFK" argued that everybody did it except your mother. And the squishy new drama "Parkland," a wan human-interest procedural focusing on some of the event's lesser-known players, restates the conclusion of the Warren Commission: That Lee Harvey Oswald, lone gunman, flagrant wing nut, acted on his own, and the rest of you conspiracy idiots can just shut up about anti-Castro Cubans and Kennedy-hating Mafiosi and various slithering snakes on the grassy knoll.

No politics or controversy here.

Rubberneckers looking for an anti-conspiracy theory will be frustrated with "Parkland," named for the hospital where both Kennedy and his alleged assailant, Oswald, were treated after their respective fatal gunshot wounds.

Those looking for some human interest in their human interest may be equally frustrated.

The focus is on two people in particular. One, Dr. Charles Carrico, a resident played by Zac Efron, who worked with his Parkland colleagues to save the president. The other, Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the fateful downtown motorcade -- his footage of the assassination becoming the most famous home movie of the century. Paul Giamatti plays Zapruder. Billy Bob Thornton, looking like the leader of a sinister cabal of fedoras, is U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Forrest Sorrels. Marcia Gay Harden is the trauma unit nurse who kicks all the suits out of the room while the doctors attempt, in a few frantic minutes, to save the president. Ron Livingston portrays the FBI agent tracking, for 18 months, the movements of Oswald. And Jacki Weaver hams it up so relentlessly as Oswald's mother, you keep waiting for the revelation that she's really an Australian character actress impersonating Oswald's mother.

Written and directed by Peter Landesman, "Parkland" comes from fragments of the Vincent Bugliosi account "Four Days in November," a book-length spinoff of his much larger and more comprehensive "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

The film is a mosaic that refuses to coalesce. Landesman shoots in a generic faux-documentary fashion so devoted to the style of director Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Supremacy," "United 93," the forthcoming "Captain Phillips") it may as well be called "Greengrassing your way to the truth."

It's up to the viewer, of course: The viewer can believe what "Parkland" suggests in the way of who was responsible and who was not, or the viewer can approach the movie more skeptically. The film doesn't really get into that stuff. But the minidramas on display, in the hospital or in the anguish of Zapruder's accidental chronicling of a horror, dart this way and that, inconclusively. Giamatti's very good as Zapruder. There was probably an entire movie in that man's story. "Parkland" tells a lot of stories, though rather harriedly.

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for bloody sequences of ER trauma procedures, some violent images and language, and smoking throughout).

Running time: 1:33.

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton (Forrest Sorrels); Paul Giamatti (Abraham Zapruder); Tom Welling (Roy Kellerman); Zac Efron (Jim Carrico).

Credits: Written and directed by Peter Landesman; produced by Bill Paxton, Gary Goetzman, Lauren Selig, Matt Jackson, Nigel Sinclair and Tom Hanks. An Open Road Films release.

"Parkland" starring Zac Efron follows the tragic day in political history when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This film features stories never told before from people there when it happened. Go inside that very day in history when you watch this movie

 

Article: Copyright © Tribune Media Services, Inc.

'Parkland' Movie Review - The Best Movie Reviews & Movie Trailers Online