Portman finds deeper core of American icon in ‘Jackie’
Biopic is about the days surrounding JFK’s assassination.
“I’ve never considered myself anything of a mimic or an imitator,” Natalie Portman said by way of explaining her initial nervousness at the prospect of portraying Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, fifirst lady of the 35th president of the United States.
“I’ve never played a character from real life that was so wellknown,” Portman said on the phone from New York recently. “I knew that I would have to do such specifific work to make people be able to believe that I was her.
“To begin, to just be credible, I had to get to a certain level of the voice and the accent, the movement and the look. It was scary, but it was also a fun challenge — to try something that I didn’t think I could do.”
I n “Ja c ki e , ” which opened Wednesday in loc al theaters, the 35-year- old actress not only gets the voice and the accent, the movement and the look right. She fifinds something deeper: the psy- chological and emotional core of a woman, an American icon, in the throes of cataclysmic tragedy.
No standard biopic, director Pablo Larrain’s Jackie offffffffffffers an intensely close-up portrait of the fifirst lady in the days surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Mixing historical fact and archival footage (and eerily precise reenactments) with an almost hallucinatory speculative take on what was going through the White House widow’s head — her grief, her shock, but also the fifierce control she maintained over the shaping of her husband’s legacy — the fifilm is bold, breathtaking.
It is also quite literally in your face. The camera frames Portman’s Jackie so she fifills the screen — as though by putting the lens right up to her, Jackie’s thoughts and feelings would spill out, be revealed.
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