A review by rsinclair6536
American Tabloid by James Ellroy

4.0

Way over the top take on mafia/FBI/CIA dealings in the times of the Kennedy presidency. Raw and violent. Clipped sentences that hit like a machine gun. Almost all male characters, and boy do they know how to mistreat each other. Joe, John, and Bobby Kennedy are here as are Howard Hughes and J Edgar H. But the stage belongs to the FBI/CIA/Mafia underlings who do the dirty work. While the language sometimes goes too far and lapses into cliche, it's all charicature in the cause of showing us how the "Camelot" we thought we were watching might have actually been something very different. The simple language matches the simpler times we thought we were in. A little long and the brutality eventually turned me off, but I liked having my assumptions about the era made fun of.