How One President Might Have Altered a War (Documentary)
The title of the documentary “Virtual J F K.: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived” pretty much says it all, though the movie itself says not nearly enough. Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency — Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam — in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone’s much derided 1991 hagiography, “J F K.”
Hinged partly on the British historian Niall Ferguson’s controversial notion of “virtual,” or “counterfactual,” history — crudely, it didn’t happen, but it could have — the documentary embraces a view of Kennedy as a president more inclined toward peace than toward war. Divided into sections and illustrated with a wealth of archival material, including some of Kennedy’s lively, sometimes combative press conferences, the movie zips through one crisis after another, interspersed with guest appearances by the likes of Fidel Castro, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Robert S. McNamara. Every so often a spectral-looking James G. Blight, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the movie’s sole talking-head authority, pops up against a white backdrop to make the same argument to the camera.
Although the movie repeatedly tries to make a case for Kennedy as more dove than hawk, its use of so few voices — woefully limited in number and overly narrow in scope of discussion — blunts and ultimately undermines this soothing take. Like Mr. Blight, another of the film’s producers, Janet M. Lang, teaches at the Watson Institute; the director, Mr. Masutani, is a Watson Institute visiting fellow; another producer, Peter O. Almond, also produced “13 Days,” a drama about the Cuban missile crisis. It’s all very chummy and, at a wholly inadequate 80 minutes, it can’t help feeling like something that would be just dandy for college freshmen who know Kennedy only from his recent cameo on “Mad Men.”
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Hinged partly on the British historian Niall Ferguson’s controversial notion of “virtual,” or “counterfactual,” history — crudely, it didn’t happen, but it could have — the documentary embraces a view of Kennedy as a president more inclined toward peace than toward war. Divided into sections and illustrated with a wealth of archival material, including some of Kennedy’s lively, sometimes combative press conferences, the movie zips through one crisis after another, interspersed with guest appearances by the likes of Fidel Castro, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Robert S. McNamara. Every so often a spectral-looking James G. Blight, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the movie’s sole talking-head authority, pops up against a white backdrop to make the same argument to the camera.
Although the movie repeatedly tries to make a case for Kennedy as more dove than hawk, its use of so few voices — woefully limited in number and overly narrow in scope of discussion — blunts and ultimately undermines this soothing take. Like Mr. Blight, another of the film’s producers, Janet M. Lang, teaches at the Watson Institute; the director, Mr. Masutani, is a Watson Institute visiting fellow; another producer, Peter O. Almond, also produced “13 Days,” a drama about the Cuban missile crisis. It’s all very chummy and, at a wholly inadequate 80 minutes, it can’t help feeling like something that would be just dandy for college freshmen who know Kennedy only from his recent cameo on “Mad Men.”