“Jackie” movie review
A 21st-century lens on Jackie Kennedy at her most vulnerable looks good, but feels wrong
LIPPED, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence.
Portman does a large amount of acting in “Jackie,” a film about the days and weeks after the murder of President Kennedy, but acting isn’t, or shouldn’t, be a matter of quantity.
Directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Noah Oppenheim, the film supplies a boorish and tacky fulfillment of an unmet desire: Jackie went to her grave in 1994 without ever sharing for our morbid delight her thoughts on what it was like to have her husband’s brains blown out as she sat beside him. The film imagines her dis- gorging herself to a journalist (Billy Crudup) — inspired by real-life author and historian Theodore H. White — at her Hyannis Port, Mass., home in late 1963. Flashbacks return us to the assassination itself (Caspar Phillipson plays the president) and its immediate aftermath. We see Jackie making funeral arrangements, clashing with the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (played by Midwesterner Peter Sarsgaard in a spectacular piece of miscasting), and reeling around the White House listening to the Broadway cast album of “Camelot,” swilling booze and faffing around dementedly in her frilliest dresses.
The film’s look recaptures the era marvelously, but the atmosphere is undermined by a script that stumbles from one improbable scene to another, notably that ghastly drink-and-dress-up sequence. A journalist called to the august presence of Jackie in Hyannis Port wearing his tie loosened? A man of that era didn’t show up for a ballgame that way. Jackie openly wishing she had been a shopgirl or a stenographer? How un-Bouvier. Today, of course, it’s de rigueur for an aristocrat to level herself by speaking of her fondness for junk food or at least sharing gossip about her bulimia. Not so then.
At its best, as when Jackie informs the children that Daddy has gone to heaven, the film’s tone is more affecting in its subtlety, and these are some poignant, graceful scenes. But for the most part “Jackie” is an act of emotional anachronism.
Instead of exploring how and why a bygone patrician class of Americans, and one remarkably regal lady, found it necessary to behave with dignity and poise at all times, the film imposes upon 1963 a 21st-century notion of how famous people should emote on cue, preferably on the “Today” show (where the screenwriter is a top producer), then collect a paycheck for a memoir and maybe do a QVC gig.
“Jackie” does more than a disservice — bordering on an insult — to its subject: It’s so obtuse about the history of mores that it’s the equivalent of showing Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address off a teleprompter.