Reel Politique: DVD Review, JFK: Reckless Youth, JFK Assassination Studies, Part 1
The 44th anniversary of JFK’s assassination passed a couple of weeks ago without the predictable fanfare. Perhaps the debunkers and apologists are waiting for the rounded-off 45th anniversary in 2008. Yet still, there was some publicity for this event that still haunts the American imagination. Vincent Bugliosi published his long-awaited, mammoth brief on behalf of the Warren Commission. And numerous documentaries on DVD wrestled with the facts and myths of the case, including The Murder of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald Behind the Iron Curtain , as did Oswald’s Ghost on the big screen (curious that Norman Mailer died soon after the film’s release…hmmmmm). In addition, MPI, as part of its True Stories Collection, has published JFK: Reckless Youth (MPI, $9.99, street date Tuesday, June 27th 2006), a 1993 miniseries based on the first volume of Nigel Hamilton’s thwarted multi-volume bio of the 35th president.
JFK: Reckless Youth follows JFK from a school boy to election night in 1947 when he won the congressional seat for District 11 in Massachusetts. By covering such a broad swath of his life, the mini-series encompasses two other movies set in parts of the same period, P T 109 (the 1963 release in which Cliff Robertson played the young naval lieutenant…Kennedy wanted Warren Beatty) and Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (a TV movie from 1977 that focuses solely on the 1946 debutante congressional race and casts Paul Rudd as the young Kennedy). In Reckless Youth, Patrick Dempsey embodies a new version, or some would say a truer version, of the president. As per the title, he is a sickly hedonist always in the shadow of his older brother Joe, groomed by the paterfamilias to lead the family name to great heights. Joe, however, dies during World War II, and in the end, John agrees to be the receptacle of Joe Sr.’s hopes and dreams. Before that, John must be frankly on display as a womanizer (an impulse he later realizes that he inherited from his father), go against his Nazi-sympathizing dad by publishing a book calling for the world to stand up to Hitler (While England Slept)–standing up to oppressors being a lesson he learned early from both his bother and his father, as credited writer William Broyles Jr.’s screenplay is at pains to make clear (in typical TV biopic fashion, no statement or action goes unnoticed by the hero, who incorporates later in his philosophy or verbal chatter, the way the Dude picks up other people’s phraseology).
The consequence of all this is not that Kennedy comes across as a “reckless youth” and therefore a reckless adult, but that he is a hero of a different kind to a new generation of politicos who might see politics as a forum for profit and an avenue to sexual excess. He appears to be the only member of his generation to have sex (with, among many others, a Danish reporter who may have been a German spy), and to have the foresight to think that his school cronies could take over for the bloated Irish pols that ran Boston in his father’s day and run a modern, successful campaign. This is less a matter of cleaning up Kennedy’s residual reputation from Hamilton’s book, which the movie does anyway, than of wised-up insider-ish Hollywood types seeing commonality between Kennedy’s hedonism and the fruits to be plucked in their own industry.
Is this three hour mini-series worth seeing? It does offer a fairly accurate account of Kennedy’s early life, and has terrific actorial turns from the likes of Terry Kinney as Joe Sr., and Claire Forlani as temporary Kennedy squeeze Ann Cannon (who in the movie ends up with future New Yorker writer John Hersey). You’ll also note professional Irishman Malachy McCourt as Kennedy’s maternal grandfather. More important, the miniseries, otherwise conventional, offers a broad background to Kennedy’s eventual assassination. One wonders if the assassination would have been averted if old Joe Sr. had been still been a force dominant enough to pull strings and wheel and deal and avert disaster.