| What would Kennedy have done? Building a documentary on a what-if question is no easy feat - and Koji Masutani's Virtual JFK doesn't quite succeed
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| VIRTUAL JFK: VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED
April 17 & 19, Cinematheque
Director Koji Masutani poses a startling question in the new doc Virtual JFK: What if John F. Kennedy had lived to serve during Vietnam? The answer seems obvious: hundreds of thousands of casualties could have been avoided in that largely preventable conflict if someone more reasonable had been in Washington.
Using a divisive theory known as counterfactual history, Masutani attempts to verify his assertions with evidence from the six foreign conflicts that Kennedy handled during his short presidency.
There was the crisis in Laos during which Kennedy abstained from sending American forces to fight the then-largely communist state. He defused tensions over the Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the two initial uproars in Vietnam.
At first, Kennedy refused to send troops to Southeast Asia but, when pressured, he relented to allowing 16,000 'advisers' with plans to withdraw in 1963. As Virtual JFK informs us, Kennedy didn't live to see this seventh conflict come to a boil. Instead, Lyndon Johnson deployed 500,000 soldiers in 1968, making JFK's amount seem downright humane.
Serving as producer and onscreen narrator of this faux-doc is Brown University professor James C. Blight, a principal adviser on the similarly austere Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War. The subject of that film, Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968, is seen in period footage in Virtual JFK, but the two films couldn't be more unlike in their efforts to determine and elucidate on the necessities of combat.
Blight, who continuously works himself into an inflated huff during his monologues, is a more than capable thinker, but he's essentially making a redundant claim. Frustration increases as he plows through such boneheaded notions as, "the person we choose in office will greatly affect whether we participate in wars."
Despite the idealist platitudes of the Blight segments, the film perks up during the file footage of presidential press conferences. Minus the heavy-handed, Philip Glass-esque score by Joshua Kern, these clips demonstrate what a persuasive force Kennedy could be in public forums. They also serve to make the rest of the movie seem doubly underwhelming.
Ultimately, Virtual JFK feels more like browbeating propaganda than an alternative history lesson.
— Aaron Graham |
Uptown
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