Susan Granger’s review of “Parkland” (Millennium Entertainment)
Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is fast approaching, so what Peter Landesman’s episodic recounting of the aftermath of that tragedy has in its favor is timeliness.
Adapted from Vincent Bugliosi’s “Four Days in November” (2008), it’s named for the Dallas hospital where the President and, later, Lee Harvey Oswald were rushed on November 22, 1963. Fatally wounded Kennedy was still breathing when he arrived in Parkland Memorial’s Emergency Room, where he was thrust into the hands of a trauma team headed by a young resident, Dr. Charles ‘Jim’ Carrico (Zac Efron), who ordered that they leave the President’s boxer shorts on while trying to
resuscitate him. Trying to staunch the bleeding and assess the damage, Carrico was assisted by Head Nurse Doris Nelson (Marcia Gay Harden) and another resident, Dr. Malcolm Perry (Colin Hanks)
While flashbacks show JFK (Brett Stimely) and his beautiful wife Jacqueline (Kat Steffens) before
bullets were fired, journalist-turned-writer/director Landesman focuses far more on secondary figures whose lives they impacted. The ensemble includes Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), who had unwittingly photographed the pivotal 26-seconds on a Super 8 camera. Lee Harvey Oswald’s stunned brother Robert (James Badge Dale) and mother Marguerite (Jacki Weaver) heard about what had happened on the radio. And, apparently, FBI Agent James Hosty (Ron Livingston) had Lee Harvey Oswald in his office just days before and was compiling a file on him, which he was later ordered to destroy to save the Bureau from embarrassment.
James Newton Howard’s melancholy score seems appropriate, and Landesman concludes with a statement from veteran newsman Walter Cronkite: “If in the search of our conscience, we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brook no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then it may be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Parkland” is a pretentious, unproductive 5, a stylized postscript revealing no new insights or relevant information, nothing that historians and conspiracy theorists have not already rehashed.
