Review: Jackie

There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance.

Jackie, the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the point of view of his wife, Jacqueline Lee Kennedy. Mostly it's a psychological portrait of a grieving, widowed mother of two small children who has some very difficult decisions to make. There are countless movie protagonists who've been put in this same predicament, but of course she also just so happens to be the First Lady of the United States, and her husband just so happened to be the President. Because of their positions, any gossip about their private lives is thought of as political fodder and is of great interest to the public. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay works across three separate but very close points in time: the few days after his death, flashbacks from the last few weeks of his life and a press interview conducted in Jackie's new home, after she has left the White House. The journalist (Billy Crudup) says that after seeing how poised she was during her television tour of the White House, he thought she could have a career on the small screen. She's quite offended by this idea, but she does know how the media works. She knows she is going to be asked for a piece by piece, moment by moment account of how it all happened and how she has been coping. She also knows that if she gives them nothing, they'll just interpret her silence however they want (most likely cruelly), so she makes sure to tell him what he can and can't print from the whole exchange. She doesn't want him to publish anything misleading, even if it’s what she actually said. She has no qualms about being slightly dishonest with the world in order to show them her truest self.

In many ways, Larraín and Oppenheim are being driven by the same curiosity as the journalist. This film is an intensely personal account of everything she felt, thought and dealt with over that terrible week, with occasional glimpses at what the rest of the world was going through too. Such a narrow focus in a historical film is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you only have 100 minutes it's best not to bite off more than you can chew, but it can also feel like a frustrating waste of all that meaty material from what’s happening around her. In Jackie, people sometimes talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles de Gaulle, Vietnam and the like, but most of what you see and remember are close ups of the First Lady as she is steadily imploding. The character of Jackie, as the title would suggest, basically is the film. Playing her would have been a tall order for any actor that Larraín might have cast. If she'd been someone with a weak screen presence, this would’ve been a trainwreck. Luckily for him, he cast Natalie Portman. 6 years after Black Swan, Portman looks set to take home another Best Actress Oscar for playing a hard-working woman who is slowly falling apart before the audience's eyes (although, unlike Nina, Jackie does manage to put herself back together again). Once again, she fully embodies every bit of pain, pressure, confusion and terror her character is feeling. For much of the film, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine looks like he's capturing a live theatre performance, and is content to let her powerhouse acting carry the film. Meanwhile, Mica Levi’s musical score is overly theatrical, and seems determined to be the star of the film instead of her.

There's no doubt that as a Natalie Portman showcase, Jackie effortlessly succeeds, but her character does feel at odds with the rest of the film's world. The most intimate scenes with the First Lady have quite a polished and digital feel to them, while all the major "events" in the film (the assassination, the funeral, Oswald's arrest) have more of a grainy period quality, which lends them a lot of credibility. While with Mrs Kennedy you certainly feel like you're watching a high-profile actress take on the part, whenever the brilliantly cast Caspar Phillipson is onscreen, you just feel like you're looking at the real JFK: that’s how much of a likeness he is.

It might have been more effective to film the whole movie in that celluloid style, but as it is, Jackie is a very engaging 21st Century look at one of the most earth-shattering tragedies of the 1960s. I suppose a fair bit of Jacqueline Kennedy's personal journey is emblematic of the global aftermath of her husband's death, and how people wanted him to be remembered. Interestingly, a later exchange with her local priest (John Hurt) is pretty much reflective of Jackie’s gradual success as a film, and not just as a Natalie Portman fan piece. Initially, both the priest and the film are saying what they need to say to justify their presence here – nothing more, nothing less – but eventually they both admit to their own limitations and give honest answers about where they think we should go all from here.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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