A recounting of the chaotic events that occurred at Dallas' Parkland Hospital on the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
It’s competently assembled, and certainly engaging, but it’s hard to see what the point of Parkland is.
Despite some affecting moments, the lumbering Parkland feels more like a well-researched magazine feature than an involving drama. As Billy Bob Thornton’s lawman says: “This was not supposed to happen.”
It’s an uneven film.
Dramatically it’s bitty, with, to paraphrase a great American newsman of the time, too much, too fast. But there is no denying how absorbing the tumultuous events of those four days remain.
It does lose a sense of narrative urgency after the grisly demise of Kennedy but fascinates to the end.
With no meat to its myriad small stories, Parkland is a recreation of a tragedy just for the sake of it, with no driving purpose or worthwhile insight except for those curious how to get a coffin on to a plane’s passenger section.
A drap drama.
The film attempts something straightforward and candid, but perhaps we are so used to the conspiratorial way this event is represented – what Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style in American politics" – that the event is irreversibly soaked in occult strangeness.
There is so much going on so fast that it is very hard to find any point of emotional engagement.
Parkland: a historical cure for all the other JFK conspiracy movies
An unavoidable imbalance in screen-time for many of the key players, which reduces much of the film to a series of distracting star turns.
Spectacularly pointless.
Barry Ackroyd's cinematography lends a typically authentic air to the proceedings and Jacki Weaver is extraordinary as Oswald's unhinged mother, Marguerite, but Parkland remains a bystander in the already overcrowded field of films about the events of November 1963.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
RSS feed of Cinema reviews