The Ten Best Scenes in ‘JFK,’ The Greatest Movie of All Time

There are few movies where the table-setting narration is absolutely essential. Cate Blanchett at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings is one example. JFK kicks off with Dwight Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech before Martin Sheen (a decade before The West Wing made him synonymous with U.S. presidents) begins narrating a quick overview of the Kennedy presidency. This is also where we get the first taste of John Williams’ score, a theme that is both prestigious and mournful.

The cavalcade of high-profile supporting actors gets going real quick. Ed Asner and Jack Lemmon play a pair of low-rent private detectives who speak in shadowy terms about whether Kennedy had it coming. Lemmon even gets to pull the “you are so naive” card on Costner. But it’s Academy Award-winner Walter Matthau who sets the plot into motion, playing a Louisiana senator whose incredulity at the Warren Commission report sets Garrison on his deep dive into the investigation. Matthau is a lowkey delight, swimming around in his N’awlins accent and talking about the magic bullet.

Oliver Stone never met a seemingly innocuous scene he couldn’t inject with a jolt of weirdo energy, which is probably why he does for big, recognizable actors in small roles. He also loves putting his audience on edge by casting against type. Remember Rodney Dangerfield as a nightmare abusive father in Natural Born Killers? This time around, it’s John Candy playing a sweaty, unscrupulous attorney who speaks like a stereotypical scatting jazz man, all “daddy-o” and “you dig?” It’s bizarre, kind of hilarious, but overall unsettling.

Kevin Bacon’s gay hustler Willie O’Keefe is the entryway to my least favorite subplot of the movie, the homosexual nightmare underworld where Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones play costume dom/sub fetish play in between arranging for the murder of the U.S. president. It’s a nasty bit of other-ing, and I don’t care for it. But Bacon’s interaction with Costner and Michael Rooker at Angola prison is a great showcase for the actor, all boastful bravado. And not for nothing, as an 11-year-old gay kid who didn’t know shit about anything, the line “You don’t know shit because you’ve never been fucked in the ass” gave me a LOT to think about.

Lots of movies get criticized for inelegant exposition. With JFK, the exposition is the best part. Stone manages to film these scenes with an emphasis on shoe-leather investigation and salacious recreation of speculative history. These scenes are also where Gary Oldman’s performance as Lee Harvey Oswald really gets to shine. But the secret MVP of these scenes is the great Laurie Metcalf, who puts so much attitude into something as simple as reporting on Oswald’s time in Russia.

Garrison’s investigation in Dallas leads him to a handful of eyewitnesses from the day of the assassination, and each one is a triumph of character actressing of the highest regard. Ellen McElduff plays her character like the star of her own movie whose story intersected with the assassination by tragic happenstance; Jo Anderson projects quiet, Julianne Moore-like frankness; and then there’s good ol’ Lolita Davidovitch as a dancing girl who saw too much.

Joe Pesci is either brilliant or disastrous as David Ferrie, who in Oliver Stone’s version of events was a major cog in the conspiracy. But there’s no doubt that Pesci looms large over the film. His final, manical monologue is a thing of bug-eyed beauty.

Hands-down the best scene in the movie is the film’s sparawling centerpiece. It’s literally smack in the middle of the movie, a paranoid triumph of a short film where Donald Sutherland shows up under a fedora and an alias and proceeds to blow the lid off of two decades of American history. The Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, Camelot, and all the rest are cast under a pall of America’s global manifest destiny, with only its most secret operators making the decisions. MASSIVELY re-watchable.

Garrison’s tumultuous home-life is the most rote and boring element of the movie. Oh, he’s become obsessed with the case, and his home life is suffering! I hope he suddenly becomes a better family man and stops doing all the fun parts of the movie! Nuts to that. However, the scene where a threatening man calls the Garrison home and creepily tries to lure his daughter into a fake beauty pageant is disturbing as hell.

In many ways, JFK loses some steam after the Donald Sutherland scene, with Stone getting mired into Garrison losing control of his team and his life. But it pulls together again as Garrison’s case finally reaches a courtroom. And in particular, when Garrison presents the Zapruder film as evidence. “Back and to the left” became an unlikely catch phrase, even as it rubbed viewers’ noses in the gruesome footage of Kennedy’s moment of death.