Given that the rather impressive resume of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is made up of generally aggressive dramas interspersed with violence about his own country, then it is quite extraordinary that he chose such a high profile quintessential American subject such as ‘Jackie’ as his first English speaking movie. Larraín is on quite a high right now with his other 2016 release Neruda having just been nominated for a Golden Globe Award, which surprisingly Jackie failed to get, but it did pick up a well-deserved nomination for Best Actress for its star.
So the movie is the story of the week immediately after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Noah Oppenheim’s script which doesn’t credit any sources, is a mixture of fact and supposition, and some of the latter is quite wild and maybe true or not. The movie starts a week after the assassination when Jackie (a totally brilliant Natalie Portman) welcomes a lone reporter (Billy Crudup) into her otherwise deserted house in Hyannisport for an exclusive interview. The journalist is never named but his character is based on Life Magazine Correspondent Theodore H White who actually was granted the grieving widow’s first interview.
Flashbacks of all the drama are intermingled with the First Lady reminiscing of the past week, and Larrain doesn’t shirk back at all from showing the gruesome bloody results of the assassins’ bullet. As she recounts the events, punctuated with a constant stream of cigarettes, Jackie occasionally lets her real feelings show through from behind her carefully measured composure, but she quickly recovers when the moment passes and taunts the journalist with ‘Don’t think for one second I’m going to let you publish that’.
What emerges from this portrait is the vision of a slightly calculating women who knew that by playing a dutiful consort to the most important man in the Western World, she would be in a powerful position to have the most privileged life that she could ever aspire too. In some of the flashbacks to the first two years of the Kennedy White House reign, we see a President reluctant to indulge his wife in her extravagent re-decorating, but she always won, and it was inferred that the reason for that was that it was a sort of compensation for his very frequent absence from their marriage bed.
Now without her husband to guide her, Jackie relies heavily on her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) to help get her exactly what she wants in ensuring that the Funeral is a fitting memorial to the President. Everyone else treads gingerly around her as she frequently changes her mind on what she wants to happen, and even the pliant new President and his wife indulge her every whim, especially whilst the entire world’s focus is on these events.
Probably one of most telling parts of the movie, and certainly the most effective, are the scenes of a distraught Jackie drifting around the expansive White House private quarters dressed up in some of her finery and bedecked with jewels, with a wine glass in her hand and waltzing around to the soundtrack of the musical Camelot, which Kennedy’s ‘court’ was also unofficially known as too.
The movie is very much a vehicle for its star and Portman in another career-best performance is nothing less than stunning in portraying this iconic woman dealing with both the incredible sadness at the death of her husband, and also the loss of the great power that dies with with. We see her as this famous grieving widow opening up to her priest (John Hurt), and she certainly grabs our sympathy most of the time. Until that is, she leads us to believe that all the drama she is now causing is possibly more about safeguarding her own legacy, rather than that of her husband.
The movie treads this fine line between dramatized reality and documenting one of the most pivotal times in this country’s history and for the most part, succeeds most of the time. Regardless of our take on how accurate it really all is, Portman’s performance alone as this intensely complicated and complex, is worth the price of admission any day.
