Though I agree with reviewers that some of the acting was less than stellar, particularly in the vapid portrayal of Jackie Kennedy, I became completely engaged in the devastation slammed into the lives of the "little people" and those charged with handling the travesty that was the point of "Parkland." Everyone was just "going about their lives," excited to see this hero President in their own city. It wasn't about memorable dialog. That was in the prepared statements of straight-faced Walter Cronkite in that new era of television reporting, but it wouldn't have been appropriate for those on the scene. The point was the event, and the total panic and confusion in what was an incredibly short time span. People were stunned, and they didn't know what to do, whether in the operating room to protect the dignity of the President by leaving his shorts on, or faced with the decision of where to put the casket. I don't care if these didn't happen in reality. I expected to be emotionally engaged in the story and I wasn't disappointed. I was appropriately jolted by the shifts between images of how each person in Dallas responded - from the Secret Service to the Dallas Medical Examiner to the typically human compulsions to crowd the one-foot square window into the operating room. Though the portrayal of Marguerite Oswald might have seemed "over the top," for me it captured her bizarre, insane determination to be the aggrieved party. What a dramatic contrast with the personal strength of her son, Robert Oswald. Even though he always believed his brother killed the President of the United States, we learn that he never changed his name and didn't move his family from the Dallas area. And the life of Abraham Zapruder was decimated. Here's a small business owner who's excited about using his new state-of-the-art movie camera to capture the President's visit. He wasn't there to film an assassination. I think I would have been "sweaty," too, if this kind of responsibility dropped onto my shoulders because of an inconceivable twist of fate. Suddenly his life was taken over by the Secret Service, the ultimate national police force, and his integrity and resistance to being in the limelight were obvious. Though he was the center of attention in processing the film footage, that was clearly not his role in the overall unfolding of events. Bottom line, I guess the reviewer and I had very different perspectives on the validity of Peter Landesman's goals for "Parkland" and how well he achieved them. I couldn't disagree more strongly with Peter Debruge's review.
