TRUTH IS THE ONLY CLIENT
Gravitas Ventures
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Todd Kwait, Rob Stegman
Writer: Todd Kwait, Rob Stegman
Cast: Howard Willens, Judge Burt Griffin, David Slawson, Ruth Paine, Bernie Weismann, Robert Blakey, Vincent Bugliosi, Patricia Johnson McMillan, David Robarge, Judge Brendan Sheehan, Judge Ellen Connally, Steve Barber
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 11/4/20
Opens: November 17, 2020

Most Americans alive today were born after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, so the event has as much emotional impact on them as the assassination of Julius Caesar. If you came into the world after 1963, you can scarcely imagine how much effect the event had, principally because there was, and still is, a big split between those who saw the killing as the act of one disturbed man, and others who believe there was a conspiracy with Lee Harvey Oswald as nothing more than a patsy.

Why do we like to believe in conspiracies? The short answer is: excitement. We want to experience conflict (all film and literature deal with conflict) even while we are working and hopefully while we are dreaming in a deep sleep. That may propel not a few knuckleheads in the U.S., including one Congresswoman elect, to go with QAnon—the belief that dark forces are at work in our country such as pederasts in the Democratic Party who worship Satan, including Hillary Clinton, who used a pizza store to plot the sale of sexual slaves.

So far as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is concerned, the conspiracy buffs insist that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole killer, the man who, like a wartime sniper, hid out in the Texas Book Depository in Dallas and allegedly fired one shot that missed and two that hit the President in the back and in the head. Conspiracy nuts insist that Kennedy was shot on the grassy knoll, in front of the open car as well as in the rear building hiding Oswald, in which the President was riding with Texas Governor Connally and Jackie Kennedy. They point out that Oswald was a patsy set up to be blamed while the real, politically motivated haters of the President were the real assassins.

That is not the only conspiracy trashed by this heavily detailed film consisting of relatively few archival shots and a boatload of talking heads, mostly older men who were around during the tragic event that occurred 57 years ago. One group believes that Jack Ruby, an extrovert who ran a strip club in Dallas contrasting with Oswald, who did not talk much, was connected to organized crime, people who hated JFK and wanted to blame Cuba. Recall that Oswald had traveled to the Soviet Union where his request for citizenship was rejected, then to Mexico City on route to Cuba. Ruby, of course, shot Oswald to death and was sentenced to be executed. Did he do this to cover up the conspiracy?

Opposing the view, the folks in this doc (see their names on top below the title) refuse to believe that anyone would want Oswald to be even a patsy, given his emotional instability, his troubled marriage to Marina, that a more reliable guy would have been set up by any rational group. Much was made in the headlines of a plot by the CIA to kill Castro with the involvement of Kennedy’s attorney-general brother Robert.

Aside from taking down theories about the conspiratorial motivations of people, “Truth is the Only Client” projects spokespersons who challenge the theory that shots were fired by people in addition to Oswald, holding that the way the bullets had hit both Kennedy and Governor Connolly could not have been fired by a lone gunman.

If you are among the 50% of more Americans not alive during the most controversial political assassination in our history, you will be lost without the background. For this you can consult Wikipedia articles, such as one on Jack Ruby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby, one on Lee Harvey Oswald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald, another on the Warren Commission which found that there was no conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Commission.

Directors Todd Kwait and Robert Stegman’s previous doc, “Pack Up Your Troubles” about living a healthy life with mental illness, and “Tom Rush: No Regrets” about a musician with great influence on the music scene here beginning in the 1960s, are both non-political and would not have led moviegoers to imagine that such a detailed albeit insufficiently archival film would come out of the Kennedy assassination. They do a fine job, but not only are documentaries perhaps the least favorite kinds of movies by the general public, but this one will require patience given its length and emphasis on one commentator after another.

The music in the soundtrack, particularly Beethoven’s funereal Symphony number 3, is not only unnecessary to set the mood but is downright distracting. I love Beethoven, but not when he is trying to compete with the rich dialogue herein.

135 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Story – B
Acting – B
Technical – B- (the music)
Overall – B