The Kennedys (2011)

Very disappointed :(

Thanks for the memories!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This 8 episode mini-series that follows the much examined story of President Kennedy. There isn't much here that would surprise anybody. It's a well-mined section of history, and this series just follow the traditional road.Although there are some in this that's not in the official records, it is already much discussed. And the situations aren't done in a salacious way.What I like most about this series is the acting. Greg Kinnear and Barry Pepper are solid as the Kennedy brothers. Tom Wilkinson has the power of experience. But I was surprised most by Katie Holmes. She was just so well casted as Jackie.

"The Kennedys" was a huge disappointment for me. The script is cartoon-ish and would have worked better with animation rather than established film actors. The accents of the actors were even worse: inconsistent and nothing at all like native Bostonians. Perhaps the jarring fact that "Ethel" is better looking than "Jackie" didn't help, either. I actually met Mrs. Onassis, a few years before her death, and she was still a knockout even then. Katie Holmes was a very poor choice for the role, a Plain Jane trying to pull off an iconic beauty. Greg Kinnear isn't bad as "Jack" but he's way too short. Seeing Holmes looming over him brought back bad memories of another mismatched married couple, namely the "TomKats". Watch this overlong work at your own peril. Giggle at all the right gaffes and you might just like it a little bit more than I did.

The story of the Kennedy family has been likened to Greek Tragedy and so it was inevitable I suppose that a major TV network would attempt to tell the intertwining stories, although there's more than enough documentary footage available I would imagine for the serious scholar to take in. This 8 part dramatisation therefore leans too close to soap opera for my taste with its manipulation of events, the most glaring example being the miraculous coincidence of JFK's slaying occurring at the exact moment his stroke-victim Svengali-type father gets up out of his wheelchair for the first time since his affliction. There also appears to be no such thing as a dramatic pause as every big moment is immediately filled with heavy-handed background music, unnecessarily sud-sing things up. Then there was the disjointed time-line employed, with the story going back and forward in time when surely the incidents depicted are so well known as to demand a linear structure. Finally, while I'm on the stump, I can only presume there were legal clearance reasons as to why significant figures like Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King and especially Teddy Kennedy are conspicuous by their absences.On the plus side, there are some good acting performances and once one forgives the actors playing such famous people not looking more like their prototypes, they at least master the distinctive Kennedy accents. Greg Kinnear perhaps wants a few inches in height but otherwise plays JFK well, right down to bearing his concealed-from-the-public back trouble, Tom Wilkinson is very good as the controlling despot Joseph Sr while best of all is Barry Pepper as the family lightning-rod Bobby. In the main female role Katie Holmes is perhaps too simpering as Jackie Kennedy but again Diana Hardcastle and Kristin Booth are very good as matriarch Rose and Bobby's wife Ethel respectively.The dialogue is well-written if stagy at times and the depiction of time and place accurately rendered.The twin tragic endings of the two brothers are if anything understated, which was probably the best way to go, but other major incidents are treated with cinematic melodrama which didn't serve the story well in my opinion.While it was a watchable mini-series, I feel it could have been improved if it hadn't had the whiff of "Dallas" about this tragic family dynasty, in more ways than one, sad to say.

This is an excellent American TV drama series, if one is satisfied with the story of Jack and Bobby Kennedy told from the personal point of view, with little of the politics, and many significant persons omitted (such as Teddy, completely). The series is dominated by the powerful presence of that egotistical monster, Joe Kennedy, the father, who is portrayed magnificently by Tom Wilkinson, in a performance worthy of an Oscar. Everybody in the series is very good except for one person: Katie Holmes was catastrophically miscast as Jackie Kennedy, and no matter how hard she tries, she is just so wrong for the part. She gets everything wrong, plays the waif, and lacks the sophistication and poise necessary. (In fact, it is difficult to think who really could have played Jackie Kennedy.) Greg Kinnear as Jack and Barry Pepper as Bobby are both absolutely brilliant, and they both look and sound like Jack and Bobby. Diana Hardcastle, as their mother Rose, is also a powerful and effective presence on screen. Kristin Booth does very well as Ethel, Bobby's wife, though whether Ethel was really like that I have no idea, not being a Kennedy expert or having met any of them. By coincidence I was in Washington (where I did not live) on the day of Jack Kennedy's funeral. My mother and I stood on the kerb of a street and Jack Kennedy's coffin went by us, covered in an American flag. A black limousine went past us, just six feet away, and inside I could clearly see Jackie and her children in mourning. It was a traumatic event for the whole country and the world. I was incredulous that several American channels refused to broadcast this series, apparently because it challenged the 'Kennedy myth', whatever that is. But really this series goes very easy on the Kennedys and portrays Jack as a hero with only minor blemishes, and Bobby as an even more heroic figure who has no blemishes at all. The only Kennedy who comes in for significant criticism is the father, Joe. The rest emerge relatively unscathed from scrutiny. If American audiences by now cannot face the fact that Jack Kennedy was a compulsive womanizer, then I do truly despair of their naiveté. A woman friend of mine told me in the 1960s that when he was a senator in the late 1950s, Jack Kennedy roared up beside her in a sports car in a Washington street and tried to pick her up as brazenly as that. Are we to suppress this kind of information about historical figures? Why? This series is certainly not historically accurate at all times. For instance, in Episode 3, Jack Kennedy twice engages Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, in conversation in the White House during the Bay of Pigs invasion. But Allen Dulles was not in Washington at the time, so that this could not have happened. Dulles made sure he was abroad when the invasion was launched, even though he was in charge of it due to it being wholly a CIA operation, for the reason that it was designed to fail. The last thing Dulles wanted was for Castro to be overthrown. After all, Castro was needed for the phoney Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year, which in turn was needed in order to ratchet up the public fear level of the Cold War and increase the spending. The Kennedy boys were highly intelligent, and when they began to figure out some of the things that were really going on, and that they were being misinformed and manipulated, by 1963 the assassination of Jack was inevitable. After all, Jack wanted to pull out of a Vietnam War, and he wanted the Federal Reserve to stop printing American currency and have it printed by the Treasury instead. You can't do that! A president who tries that won't live for many weeks, and he didn't. Presidents must never imagine that they are really in charge of anything, for if they make that mistake, they are terminated. It wasn't necessary to assassinate Nixon, because he was easier to frame and shame, and besides, he used too many expletives on his tapes. This series perpetuates the stale myth of Oswald as a lone assassin, which no one believes anymore. The series even shows him firing a cheap bolt action rifle repeatedly at Kennedy, despite the fact that it has been proved conclusively that the rifle found at the Book Depository was physically incapable of being reloaded by bolt action fast enough for the shots which killed the President. We all know there was a conspiracy and that there was more than one gunman, so why pretend otherwise in this series? Also, as far as I recall from the accounts at the time, Oswald did go down to have lunch, and did not remain on the upper floor with a sandwich as portrayed in the series. All of the political background of the Kennedy Administration is sketched so lightly you would barely know it existed, except for the racial integration issues, which are given prominence. And much is made of the fact that Kennedy appointed someone black as a White House security guard. The producers of the series are keen to show Kennedy as a friend of all African-Americans. Doubtless that was true. It is certain that some controversial scenes were cut out of the series. The actress who plays Marilyn Monroe talks in a documentary on the DVD about shooting the scenes where she sings 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President', but these scenes were not included in the series. It appears that attempts were made to soften the series in order to try to get an American broadcaster to accept it. For reasons that wholly mystify me, it still seems necessary in some circles to try to pretend that Jack Kennedy was an angel, and an ideal husband. Let's all grow up, shall we?