Pixel plot
Interview with the Assassin aims for a new JFK angle.

By David Fear

WHERE DOES THE stylistic currency of "nonfiction" end and that of narrative fiction begin? Decades ago, even a casual filmgoer could usually spot the difference: "real" meant grainy, raw stock filtered through the lens of a jumpy handheld camera forever prowling around the edges of life; anything with a surface of glossy, glassy, or grandiose imagery meant "manufactured." Of course, there were exceptions to the rule (see vague, nouvelle). But ever since digital filmmaking became the newest proletarian portal to instant auteurism, the line between truth and tall tales has become, literally and figuratively, blurrier. The rough-and-ready qualities of the pixel were already being utilized in select aesthetic circles when a little film about a mythic witch whip-panned digital into the American mainstream. The fact that something your average Circuit City customer could have cooked up concocted dread only made its faux-documentary look all the more attractive.

Interview with the Assassin is the latest digitally shot feature to tweak the "live or Memorex?" lexicon of vérité stylings for dramatic fuel, but it owes less to the Blair Witches of the world than to what may be the most (in)famous piece of amateur filmmaking ever: the "Zapruder footage," a 26-second stream of history fossilized on Super 8 celluloid. Everybody from forensic experts to conspiracy theorists to gonzo filmmakers has grasped onto its minutiae in search of clues pointing toward Mafia hit men, CIA operatives, Castro-sponsored spooks, magic-bullet theories – anything that might shed light on vast conspiracies behind President John F. Kennedy's murder. Anyone who's sat through Oliver Stone's interminable JFK has every frame ingrained in his or her consciousness, but it's still an effective Rosetta stone. When Interview's detour to Dealey Plaza begins duplicating the cinematic cadence of that landmark footage, it's not just a vogue bandwagon jump; the whole notion of a truth-based film form does a slow onion-peel before your very eyes.

The film's conceit is that unemployed TV news cameraman Ron Kobeleski (Dylan Haggerty) has stumbled across the scoop of the century. His terminally ill, loner neighbor (Raymond J. Barry) has asked Ron to record a confession to a crime: he was the second gunman who killed Kennedy. When asked for proof, the ex-marine produces a shell casing that could plausibly have housed the fatal headshot bullet, and the duo hit the road to corroborate the story. But as they get closer to finding the assassin's former commanding officer and picking up – or picking off – the final pieces of the puzzle, seeds of doubt regarding the old man's sanity began to sprout. Those strange omnipresent figures milling about wherever they go may or may not be following them.

The central gambit or gimmick, depending on your point of view, is that every ounce of information is presented to us in the medium of flattened, deadpan you-are-there interview footage, spy-cam moments (Ron rigs a small camera into a pair of eyeglasses), and video-surveillance transmissions. Director Neil Burger milks it for every meta-moment it's worth in the film's better sleight-of-hand passages, working deft tension into the low-rent thriller look. The dulled playback imagery brings Barry's unhinged performance into creepy territory – on film, he might have remained stuck in sleek psychosis-by-numbers. The now ubiquitous "caught" scenes of the camera falling or jiggling still manage to wring suspense, and in the film's best scene Roy and his wife think they catch a moving shadow in their backyard on a security monitor. Rewinding and zooming in on the footage, they watch the tape over and over again, step-pausing through their very own Zapruder reel and personal paranoia.

Interview's anticlimactic denouement deflates the long and winding buildup; some of the acting reeks of unintentional amateurism as opposed to McLuhan-esque commentary, and the use of the digital medium to convey the message is far from revolutionary. But while director Burger's mimicry of unfiltered shorthand for fact isn't original, it actually seems cleverly apropos here, since the entire Kennedy affair has been dogged by ever expanding quests for truth. Adding layers to a clever conceit, the form lifts the content above its own boundaries. Even the dimmest of audiences won't believe they're digesting fact over fiction, but this little film doesn't just find another angle on the endless fascination for whom the grass knolls, it also manages to fire a few kill shots.

'Interview with the Assassin' opens Fri/22 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film Listings, for show times.