DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN is a melancholy descant on the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It begins typically enough, with the audio recording of an eyewitness detailing what he saw right in front of him that day in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s head was shattered by bullet. The throat catches, and he has to pause as the interviewer tells him to take his time. The recording was made within hours of the event, but the film does not limit its scope to that day or even that week. Instead, it contemplates the promise that was lost when The New Frontier was consigned to history along with the country’s optimism.
Another eyewitness, Mary Anne Moorman, who took an iconic photograph of the moment Kenney was hit, refused to speak to the press for 50 years, but here recalls hearing Mrs. Kennedy scream and wonders why the Polaroid returned to her by the authorities was marred by a thumbprint. The photo itself is parsed by Brian Wallis, a curator at the International Center of Photography, who critiques the effect of such a blurry, almost impressionistic image has such power, and how that image, and so many others from that day changed the course of journalism to include bystanders and amateurs,
Filmmaker Alan Govenar does not dwell on the past as though it were a foreign country. Instead, he juxtaposes songs written by blues artists at the time with contemporary scenes of homelessness and gun violence. He draws a line that is underscored with clips of Kennedy’s inaugural address in which he asserts with his trademark vigor that helping the impoverished and troubled is not politics, but is, rather, the right thing to do. In the present, the homeless describe surviving freezing temperatures in a city where shelters charge more than the desperate can pay, and a new drug is making its way through Dallas’ addicts, one that is so dangerous that one ex-user described the dealers as selling death.
In a moment of unsettling synchronicity, tourists are interviewed at Dealey Plaza on the day of a mass shooting with an assault weapon in a shopping mall. They are from all walks of life and from many countries, the latter, aghast that guns are so easy to obtain in the United States. An American, proud owner of 15 firearms, on the other hand, naturally, sees nothing wrong with such a collection. When questioned about it, though, he doesn’t see the point of owning an assault weapon himself. The irony is there for us, but not for him, culturally inured to having guns readily available.
Such ironic moments are presented by the documentary along with little-known moments of poignance, from a Dallas choir leader receiving a black-edged note of thanks from the widow for the song written to mourn the fallen president, but which her choir refused to sing, to competing gun buy-backs, one, a church group, to destroy the weapons, the other an enterprising capitalist offering a better price in order to re-sell at a profit when new laws restricting gun ownership are being proposed.
Beautifully crafted with sensitivity and intelligence, DOWN IN DALLAS takes us beyond the images of 11/22/63 that have become so familiar that they have lost their initial power. Even the Zapruder film, now focused on Moorman and her camera, making the images fresh, as well as the shock. It poses the tantalizing “what if” and answers with a gritty “what is”. There is no way of knowing how society would be different now if Kennedy had lived, but there is no denying the innocence so clearly lost that day changed the zeitgeist forever. DOWN IN DALLAS becomes an engrossing portrait of individuals and a world processing that change as best they, and it, can 60 years on.
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