PARKLAND (Peter Landesman). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (October 4). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN
Produced by the American Film Company, which brought Robert Redford’s historically accurate, crushingly dull Lincoln assassination drama The Conspirator to TIFF 2011, Parkland once again turns key U.S. events into limp historical drama. It focuses on a handful of Dallas citizens whose lives are touched by the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Writer/director Peter Landesman intertwines several plot strands: the torment of Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) after witnessing – and capturing on film – the crucial moment the confusion of Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale) once his brother Lee Harvey (Jeremy Strong) is arrested for the crime the FBI and Secret Service agents sent reeling by their failure to protect the president and the traumatized staff of Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy and Oswald were brought after their respective shootings.
Any one of those could make for an involving, urgent drama. But Parkland folds them all together and renders them dull and empty, with every line of dialogue serving an expository function (“This is the first time in the history of the Secret Service that we’ve lost a man!”) rather than an emotional one.
Everyone is blandly effective, with the exception of Giamatti’s deeply felt Zapruder and Jacki Weaver’s painfully campy Mama Oswald. But this is never anything more than a glorified cable movie.Norman Wilner
