Review: Jackie
It's not too often that a film breathes such life into something so familiar that it renders it new and exciting. Take Jackie, the English-language debut of Chilean director Pablo Larraín, which focuses on arguably America's most famous and most documented First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and crafts a portrait so piercing and potent in its intimacy that it offers a fresh perspective whilst maintaining its subject enigmatic aura.
Tackling the great divide between public and private persona, Noah Oppenheim's deceptively simple yet multi-layered screenplay drifts back and forth between three periods in its subject's life: on the set of her famous 1961 television special A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, an arranged interview with an unnamed journalist based on Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) a week after her husband's death, and the immediate aftermath of the assassination. The effect is kaleidoscopic yet unflinching observation of a woman struggling to understand her loss but also fiercely protecting her husband's legacy whilst shaping her own.
Indeed, one of the most riveting things about the film is witnessing Jackie in all her variations and how she cannily wielded her public image to her personal advantage. Part of what makes this compelling is how she accomplished this within societal constrictions imposed upon women of her time. The Kennedys, for better or worse, understood the image and the myth they were cultivating and Jackie, with her beauty, sophistication and charm school composure, was the perfect embodiment of the youth and vitality that they were presenting to the American public. It was both a blessing and a curse that they lived in an era when public figures were more accessible via the increasing commonality of television in American households. By emphasising the White House as "the people's house," Jackie, perhaps unwittingly - and, later, reluctantly - gave herself over to that image.
"I lost track somewhere - what was real, what was performance," she confides later in the film and the film constantly conveys the cruelty of her dilemma. The image of a shellshocked Jackie, still clad in her bloodstained pink suit, standing next to Lyndon B. Johnson as he's sworn in as president is as heartbreaking to behold as the one in which Jackie cradles her dead husband as their car sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The moment when she's sobbing and wiping the blood from her face might be the one and only time she could ever let her sorrow overwhelm her before assuming the role of the nation's grieving widow and keeper of her husband's legacy.
As fragile as she appeared, Jackie was unbending in her determination to have control over her husband's funeral arrangements, which she modeled after Abraham Lincoln's after noting that though former presidents James Garfield and William McKinley were both assassinated whilst in office, only Lincoln's memory has endured. She fought to have the funeral procession despite security concerns of a second assassination and insisted on having her children by her side though, as the journalist would point out that it seemed exploitative. All her little victories she accomplished with her voice barely above that girlish whisper.
Yet the graciousness belied a steely nature. "What an awful way to begin your presidency," she remarks to Johnson as she meets him at the funeral, the line perhaps one of the most honeyed insults ever delivered. Upon their meeting, she reminds the journalist that she has editorial control over the article he's writing just in case "I don't say exactly what I mean." To prove this, she recounts the traumatic events with uncharacteristic candour, she looks him dead in the eye and says, "Don't think for a second I'm going to let you publish that." When a priest (John Hurt) tells her that God is everywhere - in the bullet that killed her husband, inside her at that very moment - she replies, "Well, that's a funny game he plays - hiding all the time." The film is exceedingly clear-eyed about Jackie, showing her in all her contradictions and complexities.
Unpredictably told and backboned by Mica Levi's eerie and wailing score, the film is a visual marvel from Jean Rabasse's discerning production design to Madeleine Fontaine's impeccable recreations of Jackie's wardrobe to Sebastián Sepúlveda's surgically precise editing to, and especially, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's insistently probing camera, which hardly ever leaves Portman's side. If one has a niggle about Jackie, it may be that everyone else is reduced to the periphery, which results in actors as fine as Crudup, Peter Sarsgaard and Greta Gerwig not doing too much. Yet it is the slightest of quibbles as Portman is nothing less than mesmerising, delivering a masterful performance that far surpasses her Oscar-winning work in Black Swan. This is a balancing act of the highest order, both a technical and emotional tour-de-force, which Portman achieves with immaculate calibration.
Jackie
Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Written by: Noah Oppenheim
Starring: Natalie Portman, Greta Gerwig, Peter Sarsgaard, Max Casella, Beth Grant, Billy Crudup, Richard E. Grant, John Hurt, Caspar Phillipson, John Carroll Lynch
