Zac Efron is the doctor on whom a nation's hopes rest in this half-neat, half-botched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take on the deaths of John F Kennedy and Lee Oswald Harvey
3 out of 5 stars
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| Scrubs up … Zac Efron as the unlucky doctor in Parkland
In the moment of dying it seems that we all become equal, whether you're a gilded commander in chief or an angry loner who can't afford shoes for your kids. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were linked by the path of a bullet on a road across Dallas. But they were also conected by the Parkland hospital, which toiled to save the life of the president on November 22nd 1963 and then did the same for his killer just two days later. Both men, poles apart, were eventually bound for the exact same spot.
Parkland, which competes for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, is a sombre, involving account of the chaotic aftermath of the Kennedy slaying, a film that takes the Warren commission as read and focuses instead on the immediate ripples. Debut director Peter Landesman sets his stall right away by showing the crucial moment of impact only insofar as it registers on the face of nearby Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), the hapless director of the world's most notorious home movie. That's because Landesman's interest is not so much in anguished Jackie Kennedy or loitering Lyndon Johnson as it is in the medics and the bodyguards, the bystanders and bit-players. Parkland gives us a neat Texas spin on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And if the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.
In the immediate wake of the shooting, Parkland marshalls its ensemble cast with aplomb. Billy Bob Thornton plays the grizzled secret service agent who boasts that he has never lost his man, while Jackie Weaver portrays Oswald's mother as a deluded harpy who sees her son as a hero. More alarming even than Weaver, though, is the sight of boyishZac Efron playing the panicked doctor who's brought in to treat Kennedy ("It's just you," the nurse helpfully informs him). One look at Efron's vapid smile and we know, as sure as night follows day, that the president's doomed.
If there is a tragic hero among this unhappy bunch, it may well be found in the unlikely form of Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale), the brother of Lee. Robert is smart and dignified; a cool head in the crisis; a moral compass for the film. But when the public want a scapegoat, it seems that he might fit the bill.
Parkland is a spry little tale from the sidelines of history, shot in a gliding, docu-realist manner and spiriting us from the blood-soaked operating theatre to the interior of Air Force One, where the seats must be unscrewed to make room for the coffin. At the end of the film a trio of gravediggers trudge onto the screen and start shovelling dirt. And yet it struck me that all of these characters (the medics and the cops, the agents and the hacks) are gravediggers of a sort. They come to clean up the mess so that the world can move on.
Source: The Guardian
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