February has been a good month for American movies in which vulnerable males stare out their bedroom windows at willowy, troubled blondes and grow obsessed. No, Rear Window has not been re-released; in James Gray’s melodrama Two Lovers a Brooklyn Heeb falls for the Shiksa next door, and in William Olsson’s stylistically assured, super-cynical without even realizing it directorial debut An American Affair, a slick, low-budget period movie with the cozy art direction of a Danish furniture commercial without even blinking an eye suggests that Jack Kennedy was a man of many mistresses and woefully foreseeable enemies.

Such is our post-Watergate American existence that we no longer see politicians as enlightened, civic minded individuals in an ennobling vocation. Such is our post-Lewinsky American existence that we are no longer shocked or even especially aroused by our political leaders’ sexual misdeeds. Sure Eliot Spitzer’s political star fell just under a year ago after his nocturnal visits from call girl Ashley Dupre were exposed, but Louisiana Senator David Vitter continues to sit in his Senate seat nearly a year and a half after he admitted to seeing prostitutes. As An American Affair deftly dramatizes, in the previous era the press corps would have just kept what they knew about the sex lives of powerful men under wraps. But lets get to those tantalizing one sheets.

Don’t believe what the posters for An American Affair are insinuating. Despite the marketing image of Gretchen Mol’s alabaster body, perched on her left shin, swaddled in an American flag, this movie ain’t about Marilyn and JFK’s lusty appointments, or any of his other sexual dalliances for that matter. Originally titled Boy of Pigs, Alex Metcalf’s long-sidetracked script centers on Alex Stafford (Cameron Bright), an awkward Catholic school boy, the son of DC political journalists (Noah Wyle & Perry Reeves), who during the long, simmering summer and fateful fall of 63’, when not getting into fights at his blissfully integrated DC Catholic school, begins working for the beautiful blonde across the street. Her name is Catherine Coswell and as wonderfully played by Gretchen Mol, in what is easily her best performance since Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral, she’s kind of a mess. Of course, being the President’s mistress can take its toll, especially when you’re estranged husband is a CIA agent (Mark Pellegrino) who, along with the sinisterly-named Lucien Carver (James Rebhorn, who despite best efforts is not especially threatening), plans (murkily) on taking out the young President.

Alex’s parents, both of whom know Catherine’s a presidential ho (throw in alcoholic, drug user and true liberal as well), want him to stay away from her, but eventually poppa relents and Alex begins stripping her yard after school while he dreams of stripping other pieces of Mrs. Coswell’s property. She teaches him how to paint and he spies her fucking a random married guy after he sneaks into her room to snoop around. Eventually he steals her diary, the one where she confesses her good times with the philandering President, and then November 22nd, 1963 happens. On come the conventional thriller beats, which you can see a mile away.

Like novelists James Ellroy (American Tabloid) and Don DeLillo (Libra), not to mention Oliver Stone, Olsson and Metcalf would have us assume that instead of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone from the fourth floor a Dallas book depository, sundry elements within the CIA working on behalf/in cahoots with some disgruntled right wing Cubans who want their country back, are the folks who blew the President’s brains out forty-six years ago. Yet unlike all the aforementioned artists, the filmmakers behind An American Affair don’t seem much invested in solving/simplifying/ruminating upon this mystery for us or especially interested in representing the man himself. Kennedy is a cipher in all of these narratives, but especially here, where everyone, including his lover, his killers and the center right journalists who report on his gaffes, seem to harbor a distinct fascination with and close proximity to the man.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Bright was as interesting af a protagonist as Mol is a wounded, not-even-but-almost femme fatale. He’s not. Nor is his struggle to grow up amidst all this lying and neurosis as interesting as the political tragedy unfolding in the background. As the film wears on, you spend an increasingly large amount of time wanting to know what its like when Coswell and Jack get behind closed doors, how, if at all, this is feasible given the over exposure Kennedy was subject to even in that bygone era and how the Cuban/CIA conspirators went about their business.

Although no one has stepped up to do a film based on Robert Dallek’s mesmerizing biography of JFK (if he just hadn’t been wearing that back brace to keep him erect…) or DeLillo’s visionary Libra (“there was so much metal in those curves he could taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you’re little”), its clear from An American Affair that Olsson would make a great candidate for either project – he has a very sure, finely detailed grasp of the period, an elegant style and a wonderful way with actors - but you sense the clearly skilled Swedish born director, like the Ang Lee of Ride With the Devil, is just skimming a provocative moment in American History here, circling and admiring its surfaces and myths instead of delving into its complexities and making them really matter to himself and, as a result, to us.