Docudrama "Parkland" reimagines JFK's assassination from ER's perspective

AS THE 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK nears, we have "Parkland," a docudrama that reimagines the whole thing as an episode of "ER."

The movie concentrates on events of Nov. 22, 1963, at Dallas' Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy was taken after being shot. It plays like a standard emergency-room drama - an overmatched young resident (Zac Efron) an efficient and compassionate nurse (Marcia Gay Harden) and a take-charge senior physician (Colin Hanks).

The dynamics are repeated soon after, when the president's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is himself shot, and the same doctors attend to his wounds, amid the same sort of ER crash-cart hubbub.

"Parkland" is the kind of measured, doc-style recreation of events that hopes, via this process, to locate something definitive or revealing.

But the movie will reveal different things to casual moviegoers and assassination buffs. Most folks, for instance, will view JFK's tracheotomy as a simple (though gruesome) emergency room procedure.

To buffs, it's prelude to a larger (and probably endless) argument about whether emergency room physicians recognized the president's throat wound as an entry or exit wound, whether they destroyed evidence by enlarging it.

Still, the movie's proscribed, you-are-there approach does yield some interesting moments.

You feel the boiling tension, for instance, between the president's Secret Service detail and the Dallas police - between national-security concerns and what the cops regard as the protocols of a local murder.

And the further the movie gets from Parkland hospital, the more idiosyncratic it gets. The narrative follows Oswald's stunned brother Robert (Jim Badge Dale), a Dallas resident, as he tries to make sense of the assassination, talking with his brother in prison, trying to deal with his weirdo mom (Jacki Weaver), who (as depicted here) had dotty stage-mother tendencies.

There is a large role for Paul Giamatti as Abraham Zapruder, whose 8 mm home movie becomes a key piece of evidence and the center of a media-bidding frenzy.

Ron Livingston plays Dallas FBI field agent James Hosty, who had been investigating Oswald, and realized he was in possession of material delivered to the FBI by Oswald himself, evidence he decided to destroy in a fit (so the movie posits) of ass-covering.

It's one of the interesting bits and pieces that figure into the movie's mostly muted collage, creating an impression that fades quickly from memory, unlike the events of 1963.

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