“Parkland”
Directed by Peter Landesman
Starring Zac Efron, Paul Giamatti, Jackie Weaver, Marcia Gay Harden, James Badge Dale, Colin Hanks, Mark Duplass, Ron Livingstone, Billy Bob Thornton, Jeremy Strong
Drama
93 Mins
PG-13

Everything that holds Parkland back is cemented right into its very foundation due to the fact that it’s a story with an airplane hanger’s breadth of anecdotal perspective. Following the journey of no less than six central characters during the days of and following JFK’s assassination, this mostly true biopic is so frequently shifting gears that it never manages to achieve a degree of focus or narrative intent. Leapfrogging from story to story, the focal point is so consistently fleeting that we never feel tethered to a single narrative. Instead, we’re lost in a jumble of self-importance and historical whodunnits with actual characters cast to the side. In attempting to capture everything about a historic day, director/screenwriter Peter Landesman has captured almost nothing.

Partially based on Vincent Bugliosi‘s novel Four Days In November, Parkland is exactly the type of historical drama that allows the importance of a true-life event to supersede the actual narrative within the film. Characters are painted in broad strokes, making their varied reaction to the assassination feel plastic, like action figures trying to sing, dance, and cry. Every story beat is so uptight and self-aggrandizing that it’s impossible to sort this mish-mash of events into whatever framework the film is supposed to achieve.

Even worse, Parkland is tin-eared to the very message it sings. This singular event was of such substantial importance that it affected each and every American person, Landesman’s film says. So why does the film itself feel so very unimportant?

By focusing on those outside the innermost circle of JFK’s life, the “facts” onscreen seem like a history lesson in the benign. One of the accounts on its own could have made for an interesting singular narrative but in trying to sardine-can the whole collection into one over-arching narrative, the whole dish ends up smelling fishy and is destined for the garbage bin.

Had Landesman pitched the idea of a miniseries to HBO, this may have been an effective study into the various avenues by which JFK’s demise affected US citizens but as it is, it’s so tightly crammed that none of the components have any room to breathe. The result is narrative asphyxiation.

Almost more noticeable than the tightly crammed tidbits of story is the slacking drive behind the project. There is nothing packed in here with a need to burst into the public arena – no missing bit of knowledge destined to be known by all. Rather, any sense of urgency is left stewing on the back burner. If anything, you could say that the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is the impetus behind the film but that is slim inspiration. With lack of purpose comes lack of power, as is the case with Parkland, a film without purpose and power.

Even the lackluster casting by Lindsay Graham and Mary Vernieu is off-kilter. The performers filling up these various character sketches are an incoherent grab-bag of talent. Spanning from ex-Disney king Zac Efron to Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Jacki Weaver to 24‘s James Badge Dale, there is no consistency of artistic capacity. Sure, Efron works with what he has and is hardly the problem in a film filled with so many issues but his presence alongside heavy-hitters like Giamatti and Weaver simply serves to confuse the audience. I wonder, what is the intention behind this bit of casting and/or was there any at all?

Further down this line of questioning: who is this film for at all? It’s very clear it’s not intended for a young audience – with the constant lack of excitement helpless to capture the short-lived attention span of the youth – and yet it’s not quite for an older audience either. Again, it just seems like a case where Landesman has no idea what he’s doing.

Landesman’s overly cautious approach to the inherently sensitive material just ends up giving everything a vanilla coating that is almost more offensive than a mishandling. While he tries his damnedest to honor the legacy of JFK in every way possible, everything is so sterilized that it might as well be a Hallmark special. Like those “films,” it’s all very slight, very mild, and mostly tasteless. A mere forty minutes into the film, I thought everything was just about over. Checking my phone (which is something I never, ever do), I realized that it wasn’t even halfway through yet. For a film a smidgen over an hour and a half, this felt like a three-hour docudrama, a testament to the short-lived staying power of this borefest of a history lesson.

And while there is nothing staggeringly bad about it, it’s just that there is so little good about it. Sure, some audience members may experience a sharply visceral reaction, depending on their personal association with said events, but none of that response comes ingrained within the fibers of the film itself. It all basically amounts to a variety of people crying over the President dying. If you cried back in 1963, I’m sure this will affect you now. Otherwise, you probably won’t feel much at all. And while no one here is arguing that the event at the center of the film are not important pieces of American history, that fact hardly legitimizes the existence of this particular film.

Often told with the wandering panache of a drunkard on Funny or Die’s Drunk History, Parkland has neither foresight into what makes a film interesting nor any captivating power over its audience. Where Drunk History mocks, Parkland tries to educate in the same capacity. Calling it exhaustively ineffective is perhaps the easiest way to sum up the misfire at hand. Try though he may have, Landesman has assassinated his own movie with a magical bullet, a bullet dosed with an extremely effective audience-tranquilizer.