RFK ON FX IS DOA: Michael Knox Beran on National Review Online, reviews FX’s coming made-for-cable movie about Bobby Kennedy, and finds it shallow, to say the least:
Oliver Stone, say what you will about him, took pains, in his movies, to lay out what he believed to be the historical basis for his beliefs, the evils of big business, the growth of the military-industrial complex, the rise of America as an imperial war state, the ongoing corruption of the country’s political life. Dismiss his history, if you like, as shallow and contemptible, the unappetizing daubery of a Sixties’ recusant; but it is impossible to deny that he aimed, in such a movie as JFK, at an historical treatment of the events with which he dealt. RFK, by contrast, exists in a kind of parallel made-for-television universe, one from which history has, through some sweet oblivious antidote, been banished.
Which is too bad–as the transformation of RFK from a tough cold warrior assisting first Joe McCarthy and then his brother to a typically warm and fuzzy liberal is worth studying, if only to understand what it was about the 1960s that caused so many to lose their focus–and their history.
Just like this TV movie.
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