Virtual JFK: Vietnam

If Kennedy Had Lived

Rating: 3 1/2

Directed by: Koji Masutani

Parental advisory: none

Playing at: Mayfair Theatre to Monday

The point behind the “virtual history” called Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, is summarized in the theory of Cleopatra’s nose. If the queen of Egypt had a longer nose, she might not have attracted Marc Anthony, which would have changed the history of the Roman Empire and thus the history of almost everything since. Where we are today depends, to a large extent, on Cleopatra’s nose.

It also depends on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Virtual JFK looks at the history of the president in the early 1960s and concludes that his actions — backing down from war in Laos, refusing to invade Cuba, pulling tanks back from the border as the Berlin Wall went up, in each case resisting unprecedented pressure by war-happy military advisers — probably meant that he would not have committed the U.S. so heavily into the Vietnam War.

It was up to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to do that, and to carry the blame for the quagmire and the tens of thousands of deaths that resulted. This comes to the screen mostly in the words of James G. Blight, a Brown University professor whose theory remains unchallenged throughout the movie.

Director Koji Masutani, a visiting fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies, has compiled an alternative history that seems self-evident: Blight argues that a president can make a difference in foreign policy. The value of Virtual JFK is mostly in the archival footage that forms a quick and fascinating history of the era, and a reminder of how politics was done half a century ago.

Much of the documentary consists of films of press conferences at which Kennedy is confronted by a surprisingly hard-nosed corps of reporters who ask him tough questions — what did he think of Richard Nixon’s assertion that never has a man talked so big and acted so little? — and gives long, reasoned, often gracious answers. It may have been all on the surface, but hearing Kennedy explain why the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis was kept secret for a week for security reasons, but then promise that if the system proves to be “inimical to the free flow of news” he will change it, is to enter an almost unrecognizable era.

There is more to the movie than that, of course: Masutani has dug up interesting tapes of phone conversations in which we hear Kennedy and Johnson discussing the ins and outs of policy, and we hear Kennedy being bombarded by his generals who want to attack Cuba during the missile crisis. Besides the history lesson, though, what you come away with is something you create yourself: the unstated comparison between civility of relations during the Kennedy era and what has come since. There’s an air of hagiography around Virtual JFK, but the argument is persuasive: if his life was longer, just like Cleopatra’s nose, the world would be a better place.

The movie was made over three years and finished in 1961 by a young filmmaker named Kent Mackenzie, who died in 1980. He shot it with a group of cinematographers – Eric Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morill – with little money but in a sparkling, rich black and white that is a vibrantly noir document of old Los Angeles. The film has been beautifully restored, although the soundtrack is slightly out of sync: the words come from interviews with the participants, and it’s unclear whether The Exiles is fiction or documentary or both.

Either way, the point is made clear in the opening sequence, a series of Edward S. Curtis photographs of Indians: warrior faces with the long stares of serious men. A narrator then tells us that we’re about to see 12 hours in the lives of a group of Indians of the present day, people who have left their reservations and who are typical of many in Los Angeles.

Their long night is dreary, riveting and haunting. Yvonne goes to the movies; Homer goes out drinking, then to a poker game; Tommy hits the bars, picks up some girls, listens to a jukebox. At the end of the night, all the men gather on “Hill X” high above the city for an informal powwow: where they are, in fact, is Chavez Ravine, shortly to be redeveloped into the new home of the Los Angeles Dodgers. They dance, they fight, they drink, they go home, speeding through the city’s tunnels in an ancient convertible.

Part of the fascination in The Exiles is historical: the rockabilly soundtrack, the pulse of the streets, even the signs in the windows (a glass of Scotch is 55 cents; a bottle of kosher wine is 59 cents, “coffee and a do- nut” is a dime.) But beneath it lies a story about displaced people: there isn’t much nobility in these faces or in these lives. “I’d rather live in that time than the time now,” someone says, looking back.

The Exiles was not released when it was made: it is only now hitting theatres and being hailed as a masterpiece of independent cinema. It is also a sad picture that tells us – in the blank stares, the alcoholic bonhomie, the crowded and

CAPSULE REVIEW – The Exiles: A restored, black-and-white independent film, shot in Los Angeles, about the lives of American Indians in a rundown neighbourhood. Beautifully filmed, it is a low-budget masterpiece, a riveting glimpse into dreary lives that pulses with loss and alcohol. Director Kent Mackenzie, who died in 1980, has a an eye for the undercurrents of hopelessness. Four stars out of five. – Jay Stone