NATALIE PORTMAN IS A FIRST CLASS FIRST LADY
Jackie C ert: 15A 1hr 40mins ★★★★★
Apart from her renown as a Chanel-clad Sixties style icon, all I really knew about Jackie Kennedy until this week was that she was the widow of President Kennedy, would go on to marry the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and that she would be forever associated with that heart-breaking instinctive scramble on to the boot of the presidential limousine to retrieve parts of her husband’s skull a split-second after an assassin’s bullet had ripped through it.
I had absolutely no idea, for instance, what she sounded like, and that is one of the biggest shocks provided by Jackie, directed by the Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín. Natalie Portman, looking so like the title character that only a detailed study of the eyebrows can tell them apart, opens her mouth and the most extraordinary voice comes out.
It’s breathy, coquettish and the accent almost unplaceable. With more than a hint of a weak ‘r’ and some distinctly strange vowel sounds, the overall effect smacks of a combination of elocution lessons and possibly a bit of speech therapy. It is very odd indeed and one of the reasons this film may go down differently with audiences here than with American counterparts more familiar with her and, indeed, with her 1961 television tour of the White House. The historic programme, online clips of which show how accurate Portman’s portrayal is, is reprised and seamlessly recreated here.
That broadcast seemed to have the same effect on American audiences as Richard Cawston’s documentary film Royal Family had in Britain in 1969, a point I emphasise because it shows how media-savvy the image-conscious First Lady – then just 34 years old – was. Even in her trauma and grief, as Larraín’s insightful film reveals, she was painfully aware of the need not just to protect her late husband’s legacy but to actively create it too.
I don’t always warm to such big, impersonation-driven performances but bear in mind two things. First, it’s just the sort of bravura acting that the American Academy love – and Portman is currently favourite to win the Oscar for Best Actress – and second, that it’s integral to Larraín’s approach. He wants to give us the Jackie Kennedy the public knew but he also wants to bring us the private woman they didn’t, a woman who seems to have mixed vulnerability and fragility with a rich vein of inner steel. It’s that conflict, that contradiction that Portman captures so superbly.
Three years ago Peter Landesman’s picture Parkland concentrated on the immediate aftermath of the assassination in 1963. Here, Larraín and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim switch the focus to the three days that followed, beginning with the emergency swearing-in of Lyndon B Johnson on board Air Force One and ending with Kennedy’s burial after the extraordinary funeral – attended by more than 100 heads of state – barely 72 hours later. Naturally, it places Jackie – who didn’t
‘She was painfully aware of the need not just to protect JFK’s legacy but to create it too’