I didn’t know that John F. Kennedy and his assassin died in the same place — Parkland Hospital in Dallas — or that the same doctor tried to save each of their lives. But how much do these historical factoids matter?
“Parkland,” covering the aftermath of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, takes one of the most traumatizing events of the American 20th century and turns it into a trivia digest.
For instance, the film taken by Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti) was 8mm, and it wasn’t easy to find someone to develop it. Lee Oswald’s brother Robert (James Badge Dale) was torn up about the assassination, while their nutty mom (Jacki Weaver) tried to sell her story that Lee was an agent of the US government (and deserved to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with the president he killed). In fact, Robert couldn’t find a church that would handle the funeral.
Local authorities argued (correctly) that this was their homicide case, but the Secret Service spirited the body away anyway — removing two rows of seats and breaking a wall in Air Force One because it would have been an insult to place the casket in the luggage hold.
All of this is secondary, even tertiary material, even if much of it is interesting and even wrenching to behold. These lesser figures were ordinary folk, admirably doing their best on a dizzying day, and their story comes across in a much more sober tone than in the soapy picture about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, “Bobby.”
The early scenes have a grip to them even if they’re not really suspenseful. The president still had a heartbeat when he arrived on the table of an inexperienced doctor, Jim Carrico (Zac Efron). But it seems obvious that nothing could be done for the man, a point writer-director Peter Landesman makes with a single, quiet gesture: Mrs. Kennedy (Kat Steffens) hands the trauma team a section of her husband’s skull and brain.
Nothing that follows, though, can match the dramatic force of those moments on the operating table. Though “Parkland” suffers from some filmmaking miscues, such as heavy reliance on cheesy musical cues, its main flaw was in its conception: It’s a series of footnotes.