Review: Oswald’s Ghost

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You can’t kill conspiracy theories, especially when there’s a Kennedy about. (There’s a great exchange in Alan Sharp’s script for “Night Moves”: “Where were you when Kennedy died?” “Which Kennedy?”) In Robert Stone’s “Oswald’s Ghost,” Robert Stone again demonstrates the tenacity he showed in his “Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst,” marshaling known and new material about of the events of November 22, 1963 into a mosaic that is at once illuminating and persistently confounding, capturing more our culture’s obsession with the unknown in the case than creating another alternative explanation. (The Dallas police tapes are a new element.) The parallels between the shock of that day over forty years ago and the aftershocks of 9/11 are unmistakable. Only the most dogged of JFK conspiracists would fail to be surprised by some of the turns in the tale. Interviewees include assassination chroniclers Mark Lane and Edward J. Epstein, as well as Gary Hart, Dan Rather, Tom Hayden and the late Norman Mailer. Stone’s directorial statement is apt: “This is a film about how we absorbed and responded to the trauma and shock of being inexplicably and repeatedly robbed of our sense idealism, optimism and security. In the past six years, we’ve watched a new generation of Americans experience that same trauma.” 90m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)