Jackie (MA). Director: Pablo Larraín. Starring: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup, John Hurt. 100 minutes
Jackie is about as far from your typical Hollywood biopic as you can get. Especially one concerning one of the most admired figures of the 20th century, former First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and centred on one of the most significant events in American political history, the assassination of her husband President John F. Kennedy. This is no maudlin, blow-by-blow account of a woman's life; nor does it bother greatly with the political intrigue that reasonably typifies other treatments of these events. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay concerns the business of myth-making, and combined with Chilean filmmaker Larraín's artful direction constitutes the making of a new myth, of which Jackie is the central figure.
As such there are layers of artifice to this intriguing telling of the assassination and its aftermath. The timeline is thoroughly disjointed, circling the assassination but not displaying it onscreen until quite late in the film, at which point it is recreated with brutal suddenness, as it occurred in life.
The primary frame for this retelling is Jackie's interview with Life magazine journalist Theodore H. White (Crudup), in which she famously compared her husband's brief, brilliant reign to Camelot — an analogy to Arthurian legend that stuck. Her conversations with a priest (Hurt) constitute a secondary framing device. These are two distinctive modes of confession in which the recent widow attempts to process and make sense of the her husband's death, and the lately former First Lady helps shape how the 35th President's legacy will be remembered.
The perspective is Jackie's at all times; JFK himself rarely appears onscreen, and often is just a shoulder or a jaw glimpsed in profile at his wife's side. There is a recurring motif in which cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's camera picks Portman's Jackie out of a wider scene, zooming slowly towards her face, which is an open book, endlessly expressive even in total stillness.
"Contemporary audiences are left free to accept or reject this vision, but never to doubt the complexity and fortitude of the woman who promoted it."
Portman's is a fine portrayal, with emotional depth extending far beyond mere mimicry. The artifices — the heavily stylised cinematography, Mica Levi's deliberately overbearing, Hitchcockian score — never let you forget that you are watching a film, but Portman's performance grounds the character in a profound sense of humanity.
Her carefully studied performance captures the