Bringing Out the Dead

The killer inside: Kennedyâs purported assassin

(Raymond Barry) speaks in the fictional

<i>Interview</i>.

The killer inside: Kennedyâs purported assassin (Raymond Barry) speaks in the fictional Interview.

Interview with the Assassin isn't about who killed J.F.K. so much as why we still care.

by Sam Adams

From UFO cover-ups to the Sept. 11 attacks, there’s a conspiracy theory for every cataclysm, real or imagined, in American history. More than urban legends or paranoid delusions, conspiracy theories are manifestations of a way of seeing the world, one in which the official story never tells the truth, and the most powerful players are the ones who don’t appear on the board. The bombing of Cambodia, Iran-Contra, Enron: The past few decades have given us so many reasons to believe that shadowy figures manipulate our collective destiny that it seems hopelessly naive to believe anything else, even if we can disagree (sometimes violently) about the whens and the whys.

That makes it a lot harder to come up with a satisfying premise for a paranoid thriller, one that initially provokes disbelief and later instills stomach-churning certainty. Confused as it was, Minority Report convincingly imagined a world where people are tracked and cataloged at every opportunity, the same way Enemy of the State put a techno-thriller sheen on the fear that an information society makes its citizens infinitely more vulnerable to government surveillance (a fear that the Homeland Security Act is pushing close to reality).

By contrast, Interview with the Assassin is positively old-fashioned. Rather than imagine a newly unearthed conspiracy, one that's been taking place under our noses without anyone suspecting, it goes back to the oldest one on the book -- that Lee Harvey Oswald was just a scapegoat for John F. Kennedy's real killer. The real assassin, for the purposes of Neil Burger's story, is Walter Ohlinger (Raymond Barry), a former Marine sniper who stood on the grassy knoll and put a bullet in Kennedy's head. He's come forward to Ron (Dylan Haggerty), an out-of-work TV news cameraman who lives across the street, because he's dying, and because he's got no one else to tell.

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There's no guilt in Walter's confession -- as Barry plays him, he's hard-edged and unrepentant, even proud. "If you kill the most powerful man in the world, I figure that makes you the most powerful," he muses. A faithful soldier, he knows almost nothing of the plot to kill Kennedy, beyond the fact that he was hired by his former sergeant. Who hired him, what they wanted, whether Oswald or Ruby were ever involved, he doesn't know and doesn't much care, except insofar as it helps convince Ron -- and by extension, whoever might someday view the footage that he's shooting -- that Walter is telling the truth.

Constructed almost entirely of footage (purportedly) shot by Ron's camera, Interview with the Assassin might be the most grounded use of digital video since The Blair Witch Project. In those few instances where Ron couldn't feasibly have been shooting, Burger inserts footage from other parties -- a security camera, a jailhouse interview -- both enhancing the reality of the piece and underscoring the fact that Ron and Walter are always, always being watched.

That might explain why Burger chose the otherwise tapped-out Kennedy assassination as the basis for his tale -- in a sense, the Zapruder film is ground zero for the assumption that all our questions can be resolved by motion picture evidence, if only we can figure out how to study it. Zapruder's footage was replayed with the obsessiveness of a first-year film student in Oliver Stone's JFK, and frame-by-frame analyses litter dozens of books which purport to prove that the fatal shot could not have come from Oswald's perch. Similarly, in Interview with the Assassin, the camera is the tool for uncovering truth. No opening title takes credit for assembling the footage (when the story ends, Ron isn't in a position to do so); the effect is like being an omniscient being with cameras -- all cameras -- for eyes. We're allowed to see anything, as long as it was recorded, sometime, somewhere. What occurs on-camera is real; everything else is just speculation.

Ultimately, the tired hunt for Kennedy's killer isn't enough to support such newfangled ideas, and the ostensible grounding in reality robs Burger of the potential for a truly loopy coup de grace. (I thought I saw a zinger of an ending coming, but the real denouement is fairly prosaic.) Ironically, Interview with the Assassin's failing may be that it's not paranoid enough.