Virtual JFK: If Kennedy Had Lived.

"At its best, counterfactual or 'virtual' history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a 'what if' that illuminates what did happen," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "Unfortunately, Virtual JFK: If Kennedy Had Lived, which begins a two-week run at Film Forum [today], is neither fascinating nor illuminating."

Updated.

"Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency - Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam - in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone's much derided 1991 hagiography, JFK," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Virtual histories may be swell parlor games (What if Hitler had been a talented artist?), but from the evidence here they can be irritatingly reductive."

Virtual JFK "is an elegantly constructed if misleadingly titled class lecture, written and delivered by Brown professor of international relations James G Blight," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Kennedy was traumatized by the Bay of Pigs debacle and was thereafter, per Blight, the most pressured president in US history. Regarded by the military brass as a 'young punk' and taunted by Republican opponents as a wimp, Kennedy was put to the test six times and each time successfully avoided armed confrontation with the Soviets - at odds not only with the Pentagon, but also his own advisors."

Slant's Ed Gonzalez finds the doc "only striking when it shows footage of [Lyndon B] Johnson talking up how we needed to march toward the inevitable and fight evil so as to ward of a greater evil. Of course, even then the film doesn't tell us anything we shouldn't already know. Implicit here - 'the 800-pound gorilla in the room,' according to the film's press notes - is that George W Bush also took us down the wrong path. And that you should vote for Obama. But seriously. Duh."

"Less than a year after Kennedy's assassination, the now vilified Lyndon Johnson finally passed the Voting Rights Act," Benjamin Strong reminds us in the L Magazine. "Apologies to Masutani - and to Senator Obama - but you can't find a more virtual JFK than LBJ."

Update: Virtual JFK is "less a documentary than a sort of feature-length lecture, a growing trend in the political doc genre in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth," notes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "It's a subgenre that doesn't make for the most visually explosive cinema - Virtual JFK essentially consists of Blight's narration explicated by Kennedy press conferences and other archival footage, including some revealing taped conversations between Kennedy and his advisors. But despite his film's dryness, Masutani successfully sells a provocative, if one-sided, thesis that goes beyond unprovable 'What if?'s and takes on the more fruitful debate of how much a single man can effect the course of history."

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2008 12:59 AM