Parkland
Dir: Peter Landesman
2013
***
Parkland tells the story of JFK's infamous assassination but from the view point of several key witnesses who where there on the day. This isn't a conspiracy film, instead it deals more with the extraordinary ordinary things that happened on that day and the things most people don't know about. The coroners stand off with the secret service, the man who filmed the now famous shooting, the Doctors who tried to save the president and the servicemen left with the worst case scenario in their hands. All these reenactments bring life to the documents of the day but they're never quite as compelling as a good old fashioned documentary. The ensemble cast is great but no one really has anything they can really get their teeth into, as soon as the film come back into well know territory it quickly ceases to be interesting. What I did like about the film though was the inclusion of the Oswald family. The scenes featuring Oswald's Mother and Brother are by far the most powerful and the most interesting. A film dedicated to their story would have been more interesting but it's fine all the same.