Portman captures Jackie’s grief
Jackie (M, 99mins) Directed by Pablo Larrain ★★★★1⁄2
Pablo Larrain hasn’t made a film I’ve seen that hasn’t turned out to be one of my favourites of the year.
Tony Manero, No and The Club – all set in his native Chile – are distinguished by Larrain’s willingness to take on dark and potentially troubling material and present it with a blistering humour, an eye for satire and a gleefully bleak view of humanity that never trips over into cheap cynicism.
Larrain is film-maker’s filmmaker. Whoever it was who decided to fly him north to direct Jackie deserves an award of their own.
Jackie is Larrain’s North American and English language debut.
The film is a retelling of the days before and after the assassination of John F Kennedy, but through the eyes of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy; known to America and the world as Jackie.
In Larrain’s hands the story has been re-assembled as a jagged, pacy and engrossing back-andforth through November 1963.
We enter the story in its own aftermath, with the Life magazine writer Theodore White summoned to Jackie’s post-White House home to be indoctrinated in exactly how she wanted America to remember her husband.
The interview – more of a dictation in this telling – forms the backbone of a film which now begins to roam between meticulously recreated archival footage, the day of the murder in Dallas, and the week of planning and internal politics that culminated in Kennedy’s state funeral.
Jackie shifts abruptly in pace, tone and content. The film serves up a succession of stunning narrative choices, at least some of which were surely made in the edit suite, not the writer’s laptop.
A brief recreation of the actual murder – shockingly well done – arrives late, bookended by scenes of Mrs Kennedy with her priest – a beautifully cast John Hurt.
At the heart of it all, in pretty much every frame and utterly dominating this picture, Natalie Portman turns in a title performance that is one of the
Natalie Portman turns in a title performance that is one of the most unearthly and impressive pieces of work I’ve seen.
most unearthly and impressive pieces of work I’ve seen from any actor in years.
Portman perfectly captures the cruel bi-polarity of public grief.
If there was ever an Oscar you could start engraving before the nominations were even announced (this week’s Golden Globe result notwithstanding), then it’s the one that will be handed to Portman on February 26.
Around Portman, Peter Skarsgaard is solid and unshowy as Robert Kennedy and Greta Gerwig finds some nice moments as Nancy Tuckerman, Mrs Kennedy’s childhood friend and private secretary.
Jackie is a beautifully layered film. For all its rigour as a recreation of history, it is also a thought provoking investigation of fame, public persona and of the process of mythologising.
White’s 1000 word piece for Life was the beginnings of the ‘‘Camelot’’ myth. In her grief, desperate not to let history remember her Jack as anything other than an American hero, Jackie made sure that White wrote exactly what she wanted.
It was a spectacular and steely pre-emptive PR coup from a woman who only weeks before had cradled the wreckage of her husband’s skull on her lap.
To this day, the Kennedys are still America’s royalty of the mind and the lineage that every prospective president tries to claim or forge a connection to.
Jackie is subjective and impressionistic, but also disciplined and extremely well thought-through. Larrain shows us a familiar story through a new lens, and in doing so has made a moving, engrossing and hugely impressive film. - Graeme Tuckett