Interview with the Assassin

Interview with the Assassin

This man is one reporter's story of the century.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Raymond J. Barry and Dylan Haggerty
Director: Neil Burger
Rating: Not rated (contains language and mild violence)
Genre: Drama

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On DVD June 17 (Not rated) 88 minutes

Grade: C+

Verdict: Inventive like a film-school exercise, but less than persuasive as a full-length film.

By Ty Burr
Boston Globe

"Interview with the Assassin" owes a lot to "The Blair Witch Project," the film that created the genre one could either call "crock-umentary" (a fictional narrative told using apparently raw camera footage seen from the point of view of one of the alleged real-life participants) or "dork-umentary" (the character behind the camera is a clueless fool who has no idea what he or she is getting into). The new film, written and directed by Neil Burger, is an intriguingly lean example of the form, but, like "Blair Witch," it never quite finds a way out of its own built-in dead end.

"Interview" gets right to the point: Unemployed TV cameraman Ron Kobeleski (Dylan Haggerty) is asked by Walter Ohlinger (Raymond J. Barry), the well-pressed old duffer who lives across his suburban street, to film a confession. It turns out to be a lulu: Walter was, or claims to have been, the gunman on the grassy knoll on Nov. 22, 1963. At first, the cameraman asks the right journalistic questions: Do you have proof? (The shell casing from the bullet that Walter says killed Kennedy.) Who hired you? (Walter's ex-Marine commander.) Who hired him? (Don't know.)

Once the two travel to Dallas, though, Ron is hooked by the sheer rush of possibility, and so is the audience. "Interview" is at its strongest both as a movie and as a "real" event in the creepy-crawly sequence where Walter and his camera-wielding Boswell wander around Dealey Plaza, looking over the fence where Walter says he stood that day, panning with the remembered motorcade, noting the "X" painted on the street where the president's head came apart. The scene has the feel of a high-end home movie, and it ends with a sick capper: Ron coaxing an unwilling Walter to pose for pictures with two bland, unknowing tourists.

Is Walter who he says, or is he a nutcase with a darker endgame in mind? The latter becomes increasingly probable as Ron heads further down the film's one-way street, growing ever more paranoid himself.

As the walls close in, "Interview With an Assassin" becomes both more preposterous and more hemmed in by its conceptual gimmickry. The moment when the film and Ron (its ostensible recorder) cross the line is when Walter pistol-whips a cop he thinks is tailing him, and the cameraman, while voicing alarm, just keeps filming. He can't do otherwise -- if he did, Burger wouldn't have a movie.

Eventually, "Interview" comes off as a film-school stunt that never breathes the air outside its sealed-off universe. Where Burger improves on the model is in leaving more than one possibility open at the end, and in casting ramrod Barry as Walter. The character actor (he played Tom Cruise's father in "Born on the Fourth of July") here is both unforgettable and a human smudge, a psychopath and a nonentity. At one point Ron (i.e., Burger) films Walter boogieing down to a dreadful Muzak-rock tune in an anonymous motel room, and the shot goes on for an awfully long time. You understand why: It's the banality of evil, in boxers.