A-Directed by Pablo Larrain Starring Natalie Portman, Billy Crudup, and John Hurt Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Jackie Kennedy gets the biopic treatment in Pablo Larrain's fascinating film Jackie, but the film wisely focuses only on the weeks after her husband was assassinated. As she (Natalie Portman) gives an interview to a reporter (Billy Crudup), discussing the seismic event and how she's dealing with the aftermath, Larrain flashes back to moments scattered throughout JFK's presidency, sketching out the first lady's philosophy and her ultimate goal of mythologizing her husband's memory. Larrain and his editor Sebastian Sepulveda weave the film's varied time periods together, and include a tense and visceral assassination scene, punctuated with gruesome sound design, that loses nothing from the viewer knowing how it ends. Anchored by a brilliant script by Noah Oppenheim and Portman's all-encompassing performance, Jackie is as multi-faceted as its protagonist, finding each of her personas and only catching a fleeting glimpse of her true one.
As first lady to a president beloved for his superficial qualities, Jackie is shown as a modern, for the 60's, housewife. Her famous White House tour is readily imitated by Portman, with the various antiquities and design improvements pointed out for the fawning cameras. She's a loving mother to her two young children, and a stunning hostess, bringing luminaries from the world of art and music into the White House for galas with no respect for the cost. She services her public and private self during these exhibitions, as having world-renowned cellists play for the president means that he, and the country by extension, values beauty, while she also gets to experience transcendence through the performances. Not much time is spent on the first marriage, though Larrain slyly accuses JFK of humiliating Jackie with a post-assassination birthday scene for John Jr. Any Kennedy in proximity to the Happy Birthday song immediately brings to mind Marilyn Monroe. As the song is sung, Portman's face slightly winces, reminding the viewer that she was repeatedly humiliated by JFK.
Nevertheless, Jackie mourns for her dead husband as if he was always faithful and loving. Spattered with blood and gore from JFK's death, Portman wears a dazed look underneath her iconic pillbox hat. Her grief drives her to drink in a boozy sequence, stalking around the presidential quarters with a bottle of gin as she tries on dresses and listens to songs extolling the legend of Camelot. Mica Levi, the composer behind the haunting score to Under the Skin, is just as atmospheric here, with tense strings subbing in for the frayed nerves firing in Jackie's head. These scenes of Jackie by herself or with a priest played by John Hurt seem to be her at the closest thing to honesty, like this self-shielded woman no longer has the energy to keep up the facade. At her most vulnerable, figures in both JFK's outgoing and LBJ's incoming administration are fine with shunting her aside, both because that's the way it goes with a new first family needing to move into the White House and because, beyond simple kindness, there's no longer any reason for people at the top of the food chain to pay her anymore attention.
With her grand final gesture, Jackie shows that she will not be ignored. Beneath her studied persona as a pliant wife and mother, she's hiding a canny font of intelligence, and in the wake of JFK's death, she's immediately thinking about the funeral and the image of her husband that she is going to leave the country with. A student of history who knows how forgotten past assassinated presidents like Garfield and McKinley are, she wants everyone to make a connection between her husband, derided accurately by Peter Sarsgaard's RFK as a middling president whose greatest accomplishment was solving a crisis of his own making, and Lincoln, universally regarded as the country's greatest president. Further massaging history as it's being made with Crudup's reporter, she strikes certain things and writes others for him with a view far into the future, mastering one more piece of perception and one more potential haughty roadblock. This is the last gift she can give to her husband. Just as she cultivated a sense of him as a tasteful and cultured man of letters, she'll almost single-handedly ensure that people admire him long after they can't think of a single positive thing to say about his record.
Jackie depicts the former first lady as a skillful player equal to any of the time period, but one hampered by the regressive society of the time. Left with little choice, she wielded her feminine power as well as she could, carving out a legacy for her family that has withstood decades of intervening time. Portman gives perhaps the finest performance of her career, less showy than her epic turn in Black Swan but with a fantastically weird accent to boot, and Larrain and his crew are technically superb. This film is about the first draft of history forming across brows and tentatively spoken as trial balloons, an intriguingly rare approach to period dramas about real events. In going for the macro of that heady subject and the micro of a woman adjusting to the loss of her husband, Larrain bridges the gap between the grand figures that Jackie constructs and the real person that she might have been. A-
Nevertheless, Jackie mourns for her dead husband as if he was always faithful and loving. Spattered with blood and gore from JFK's death, Portman wears a dazed look underneath her iconic pillbox hat. Her grief drives her to drink in a boozy sequence, stalking around the presidential quarters with a bottle of gin as she tries on dresses and listens to songs extolling the legend of Camelot. Mica Levi, the composer behind the haunting score to Under the Skin, is just as atmospheric here, with tense strings subbing in for the frayed nerves firing in Jackie's head. These scenes of Jackie by herself or with a priest played by John Hurt seem to be her at the closest thing to honesty, like this self-shielded woman no longer has the energy to keep up the facade. At her most vulnerable, figures in both JFK's outgoing and LBJ's incoming administration are fine with shunting her aside, both because that's the way it goes with a new first family needing to move into the White House and because, beyond simple kindness, there's no longer any reason for people at the top of the food chain to pay her anymore attention.
With her grand final gesture, Jackie shows that she will not be ignored. Beneath her studied persona as a pliant wife and mother, she's hiding a canny font of intelligence, and in the wake of JFK's death, she's immediately thinking about the funeral and the image of her husband that she is going to leave the country with. A student of history who knows how forgotten past assassinated presidents like Garfield and McKinley are, she wants everyone to make a connection between her husband, derided accurately by Peter Sarsgaard's RFK as a middling president whose greatest accomplishment was solving a crisis of his own making, and Lincoln, universally regarded as the country's greatest president. Further massaging history as it's being made with Crudup's reporter, she strikes certain things and writes others for him with a view far into the future, mastering one more piece of perception and one more potential haughty roadblock. This is the last gift she can give to her husband. Just as she cultivated a sense of him as a tasteful and cultured man of letters, she'll almost single-handedly ensure that people admire him long after they can't think of a single positive thing to say about his record.
Jackie depicts the former first lady as a skillful player equal to any of the time period, but one hampered by the regressive society of the time. Left with little choice, she wielded her feminine power as well as she could, carving out a legacy for her family that has withstood decades of intervening time. Portman gives perhaps the finest performance of her career, less showy than her epic turn in Black Swan but with a fantastically weird accent to boot, and Larrain and his crew are technically superb. This film is about the first draft of history forming across brows and tentatively spoken as trial balloons, an intriguingly rare approach to period dramas about real events. In going for the macro of that heady subject and the micro of a woman adjusting to the loss of her husband, Larrain bridges the gap between the grand figures that Jackie constructs and the real person that she might have been. A-
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