On a technical scale, this was unlike anything Stone had really done before. He, cameraman Robert Richardson, and editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia mix documentary footage and documentary-like footage with the actually movie, cutting from black-and-white to color and back again, without ever confusing us. They go into all the technical parts of the assassination, from showing Oswald (Gary Oldman) firing the rifle to showing Garrison (Kevin Costner) and his assistant Lou (Jay O. Sanders) testing that very rifle to see if Oswald, or anybody, could have killed Kennedy with that gun. Rather than being overwhelming, Stone's technique of mixing footage actually helps us keep track of the story, and his theory.
He also helped this along with his casting. There's a danger, of course, in casting well-known actors in small parts in a movie such as this, in that we see the actor and not the part he's supposed to play. Stone, on the other hand, felt that he had a lot of information to disseminate in the movie, and people would be able to follow it better if a familiar face was giving it out. And so, in addition to Costner as Garrison and Oldman as Oswald, we had Tommy Lee Jones as the elusive Shaw, Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, a flamboyant pilot who may have played a part (and who gets one of the most well-known lines of the movie, "It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma"), John Candy as Oswald's lawyer, Dean Andrews, Kevin Bacon as a male hustler, Walter Matthau as a senator who first gives Garrison the idea of investigating the assassination, and Donald Sutherland as "Mr. X," an unidentified general who feeds Garrison information. With one exception, all the actors do a good job at playing their roles; Pesci in particular is almost as good here as he was in GOODFELLAS. And Costner, though playing a somewhat whitewashed figure, is terrific as the straight man in all of this. Only Sissy Spacek gets stranded here as Garrison's wife; this is a nothing part, and she's unable to do anything with it.
It's possible you may not believe any of what Stone says here, or to have problems with it, and still enjoy the movie. Personally, along with the whitewashing of Garrison, I have problems believing Kennedy was killed because of his aversion to war, as Stone claims (after all, Kennedy was the first to put forth what became known as the "domino theory," which said basically we shouldn't let any nation fall to Communism, because if one falls, the rest fall like dominos). I also find it unlikely that Justice Earl Warren, a noted liberal, would participate in a right-wing coverup, or that Oswald himself alerted the FBI about the assassination, as Stone claims. But if the dust finally settles over the question of who really shot JFK, I hope people will come to see JFK for what it is; a somewhat flawed but nevertheless terrific movie.
