Kennedy Biopic is Bad, Not Slanted

It's doesn't last a thousand days like the Kennedy Administration. It only feels like it does.

"The Kennedys" miniseries, abruptly dropped by the History Channel amid hints of none too subtle pressure from the namesake family (as reported by FrumForum),  premieres in the U.S. this weekend on ReelzChannel.  This publicity will likely ensure a record audience for the little-known cable-caster, but the story of the miniseries' disappearance from the History Channel is far more enthralling than the show itself.

This isn't the exercise in rabid revisionism keepers of the JFK flame had feared and some on the right were hoping for. Ideologically neutral, "The Kennedys" isn't bad -- or slanted -- history, per se. It's simply bad television. By the time the eight-hour presentation wraps up, it's an open question as to how many viewers will have been able to endure it.

The show's producers say they modeled its structure on "The Godfather", a latter-day Greek tragedy masquerading as a crime family saga in which hubris is punished by a series of unthinkable, seemingly unending tragedies.

But they're overreaching.

Better to think of "The Kennedys" in terms of "Dallas": a dynastic soap opera about a family so very wealthy members even sport  haute couture gym shorts to backyard games of touch football (since no one working on the show could distress a costume, the likelihood of them producing something distressing to Kennedy partisans must  always have been remote).

All the stock soap characters are here: the overreaching patriarch; his long-suffering wife who dispenses wisdom and iron discipline in equal measure; the sometimes loving, sometimes feuding  young 'uns; their achingly beautiful spouses; the adorable grand young 'uns.

So are all the stock soap opera situations. Feuds between father and sons.  Sibling rivalries. Affairs of the heart (a lot of them). Only affairs of state provide the backdrop and motivations for this generation-spanning saga, not Texan oil.

The now-familiar chronicle of triumphs and tragedies is so superficially presented in the script, the psychological and emotional portraiture so very one dimensional, the miniseries' family dynamics really do end up owing more to Bobby and J.R. Ewing than to Bobby Kennedy and J.F.K.

Tom Wilkinson dominates the proceedings as a rapacious, splendidly vainglorious Joe Kennedy,  his twin fixations on power and respectability in WASP-dominated America Writ Large in every scene he appears in. Forced by history to transfer his ambitions for founding a political dynasty to runtish, bookish spare Jack (Greg Kinnear) when heir-apparent Joseph Jr. dies in World War Two, he's equal parts kingmaker and Stage-Father From Hell.

Greg Kinnear's performance as John F. Kennedy amounts to neither characterization nor caricature. If Martin Sheen inhabited the role when he played J.F.K. in a 1980s miniseries, Kinnear seems to be merely squatting here.  He hits all of his marks, delivers some of J.F.K.'s most famous lines (along with the screenwriters' less inspired ones) in yeoman-like manner. But so does the audio-animatronic Kennedy figure in Disneyworld's Hall of Presidents.  And the robot wouldn't have made for ideal casting, either. There's something bloodless about Kinnear's portrayal of a man who even his enemies conceded was the quintessence of political charisma.

The rest of the cast of seemingly thousands -- everyone in the Kennedy legend from the crew of PT 109 to mobster Sam Giancana to, yes, Marilyn, makes at least a cameo appearance -- is entirely serviceable.

Only poor Katie Holmes, who goes the Minnie-Mouse-On-Helium route in her efforts to channel Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's slightly breathless elegance, is entirely out of her depth. Embarrassingly so.  She seems to have blundered onto "The Kennedys'" set while en route to an appearance in a Tina Fey skit.

All of the political-cultural Kennedy touchstones are on display here -- from the dubious Pulitzer Prize for a largely ghost-written "Profiles In Courage" to the nail-biting 1960 election to the Berlin Wall speech. And, unavoidably, Dallas. So is the prescription drug abuse and the like-father-like-sons womanizing kept off-camera in previous dramatizations.

But those concerned the production would be to the Kennedys what Showtime's upcoming "The Borgias" is to that Renaissance-era dynasty  -- a raunchy pageant of family and political intriguing, wild sexual couplings and Machiavellian ruthlessness -- need not have worried.

"The Kennedys" is not right-wing,  made-for-TV iconoclasm. But it was made for television.  And the show violates every single one of television's first nine commandments  -- "Thou shalt not bore" (the tenth is "Thou shalt have right of final cut": and conservative producer Joel Surnow, creator of the arresting beat-the-clock action drama "24", did).

The cowardice of the History Channel, which argued straight-faced this production didn't meet the rigorous standards it employs when fact-checking documentaries about Roswell, Nostradamus  and the Bermuda Triangle, is inexcusable. But so, too, is the dreariness of this multi-million dollar undertaking.

An artist, JFK once said, must always be free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. How sad Surnow's vision only took him as far as re-imaging the Kennedys' unruly history as a generic prime time soap.