After decades of
documentaries, fiction films, scholarly tomes, and mimeographed underground
newsletters, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is as picked-over
as a week-old Thanksgiving turkey. Yet for much of its running time, Robert
Stone's documentary Oswald's Ghost proceeds as though it's delivering breaking news.
Stone's stated purpose in making the film is to show how a national tragedy
evolved into something like a worldview. Some people's reactions to the Kennedy
shooting became their way of understanding the relationship between governments
and their people, and in a roundabout way, explaining how 9/11 begat the Iraq
War. But Stone gets sidetracked by details, and rather than thoroughly
examining those ramifications, he winds up rehashing all the old arguments in
favor of a Kennedy-killing conspiracy, and a few—too few—of the
arguments against.
