The film is especially good at evoking the chaos, panic and sickening bloodshed around Kennedy’s shooting. Except for the eloquent television commentaries by Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, which make the squawking of most contemporary bloviators sound trite and overblown, many of the words spoken are in-the-moment reactions of everyday people under stress. “Parkland,” named for the Dallas hospital where President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were rushed, is a considerable technical feat in which original television footage and dramatic re-creations mesh into a fairly seamless visual narrative. The theory seems to be that by keeping most of the major turns of events off-camera and concentrating on the responses of secondary players, including doctors, nurses and federal and state officials at the scene, a story we think we know will be refreshed. Landesman, a journalist and novelist who adapted the story from Vincent Bugliosi’s 2008 book, “Four Days in November,” had a high-minded rationale. And when it does, sooner than expected, you sigh with relief.īecause the film, which affects the style of “United 93,” offers no new insights, theories or important information, you’re left wondering why it was made. You clench your fists, suck in your breath and remind yourself that the pain will end.
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Watching the movie is like enduring dental surgery without anesthesia. For the events depicted, no matter how familiar, still hurt.
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As a whole however Parkland is a huge missed opportunity and a mishandling of a story that deserves to be told in a much more professional manor.Ģ wasted actors out of 5 Related articles There are small scenes throughout the movie that seemingly show off what could have been such as Robert’s confrontation with his brother in custody or the hospital scene featuring frantic efforts to keep JFK alive. Somewhere deep down at the core of Parkland is a good movie waiting to be exposed. With no centralised figure to hold things together any emotional pull that Parkland should have had with such a tale is completely non-existent and the films big set pieces fall flat because of the same reason. Actors such as Zac Efron, Tom Welling, Billy Bob Thornton, Marcia Gay Harden, Ron Livingston and most short changed of all Jackie Earl Haley barely seem to breathe before their characters are seemingly gone in a puff of smoke. Not once in the films short 90 minute time does a character get a chance to really make an impression with only James Badge Dale as Robert Oswald and Paul Giamatti as Abraham Zapruder seemingly getting more than 10 minutes screen time. This low level production feel acts as a way to completely waste the talent on camera also. To pinpoint a major failing in Parkland one must look squarely at the direction of former controversial journalist Peter Landesman who films the movie in the Paul Greengrass school of direction technique with fast swift cuts, quick zooms and shaky cam galore but what works so well for someone like a Greengrass here merely comes off as obtrusive to the story and amateurish giving Parkland an almost student made feel. It’s not hard to see why this star studded vehicle set around the JFK assassination came and disappeared from theatre’s faster than you could say “waste of talent” for Parkland is a disjointed mess of a movie that at every turn fails to encapsulate what really should be a captivating and insightful look into a dark day and subsequent period of American history. The movie looks at participants including Doctor Charles Carrico (Efron), brother to the suspect Robert Oswald (Badge Dale), hardworking businessman Abraham Zapruder (Giamatti) and a raft of others whose lives were changed with one bullet.
Plot – Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s book Parkland looks at the day and preceding days of JFK’s fateful trip to Dallas Texas in 1963. Cast – Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron, James Badge Dale, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston, Tom Welling, Marcia Gay Harden, Colin Hanks, Jacki Weaver