Jackie

Directed By: Pablo Larrain Written By: Noah Oppenheim Starring: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt

Pablo Larrain’s Jackie opens with a blackened screen and a sudden flood of dissonant strings. It is an anguished, austere piece of music, one that quashes, with immediacy, any notions of the elegance that one might attach to the life of Jackie Kennedy. It is a pained, depressed moan, sounding somewhere between that of a car’s tyres screeching and a whale calling, and with it one key question is answered. How do you make a film about an American with the surname Kennedy in 2016/17 without being redundant? Jackie does it by delving into the morose; burrowing into the sheer tumult and confusion of such a life.

Crucially, Jackie is not a film about conspiracies, about crimes or violence. Jackie does not attempt to relay the machinations of what happened that day in Dallas when JFK was shot; it does not pretend to have fresh insights regarding what is arguably America’s most famed murder of the 20^th century. What Jackie does offer, is a deeply personal character portrait, one which champions mood above plot and viscerally transports the viewer into a mind unknowably troubled and conflicted, the mind of Jackie Kennedy (played here by Natalie Portman) in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination.

There is not an apparent narrative trajectory to Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay, rather the story takes a kaleidoscopic look into its protagonist, pivoting between a series of subplots with Jackie’s prickly interview with Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup), a Life magazine reporter summoned to Jackie’s estate, providing the anchor. It is a fascinating dichotomy quickly established between interviewer and interviewee, as Jackie wrestles White into asking the right questions and only taking the notes she condones, consigning the journalist to walk on egg shells as he toils fruitlessly to get to his subject’s core; “don’t think for one moment that I’m going to let you publish that” Jackie snaps after a teary moment of vulnerability. But between these passages are a series of other, equally fascinating interplays; Jackie’s dealings with Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) as the two mutually grieve; her clashing with Lyndon Johnson’s people as she determines to enshrine her husband’s legacy in American history through an elabo

rate funeral modelled off Lincoln’s ceremony, despite warnings of danger; Jackie’s moments of introspection with an aged priest (John Hurt); all of which is contrasted with Jackie in 1962 where she presents her famed tour of the White House for television.

The connecting thread between all of these strands is Jackie herself and her evolving, ever complex psychology, which Larrain explores with great intimacy. The challenge is not to illuminate what happened in Dallas on that fateful day, but to illuminate the emotional chaos which that day envelops. These are difficult, complex emotions to articulate, but Larrain does it, with a dark, mesmerising empathy.

The intimacy demanded by Larrain’s approach is evoked in the way the director uses his camera, uncomfortably encroaching upon his character’s features with extreme close-ups, placing us in their breathing space, allowing their pain to linger, to spill from the screen into its viewers.

The magnificent, aforementioned score by Mica Levi supplies much of Jackie’s unnerving, visceral output. Its discordant, icy rush of fractured melody is wrong footing and harsh to the ear, bearing an uncanniness that nestles uncomfortably in the pit of the stomach. One is not entirely sure how to feel listening to Levi’s compositions, a quality which allows the score to serve Larrain so hauntingly in his quest to access Jackie’s mind, perfectly encapsulating the haze of confusion the eponymous character finds herself within, she too uncertain how to feel, uncertain of what to do. Should she bear her soul to the American public, speak to them candidly about her experiences, or should she craft a narrative through which her husband can transcend time, escaping the unfortunate fate of the James Garfields and William McKinleys of the White House? “I believe the characters we read on the page end up being more real than the men who stand beside us” Jackie says at one stage. She understands that to secure a “Camelot” legacy for the Kennedys, she must play a particular part in order to most effectively manoeuvre the media which feeds the public.     

Embodying these emotions, and at the film’s heart, is of course Natalie Portman, whose performance is as mercurial emotionally as it is physically. It would be too easy to get swept up by Portman’s faultless imitation of Jackie Kennedy; her masterful affectation of Jackie’s distinguished upper class voice, the grace and dignity with which Portman wears Jackie’s hair and trademark suits; but the performance is much deeper than mere mimicry. Note the subtle shifts in Jackie’s demeanour, her transformation from uncertain, nervous T.V figure adrift in the mechanics of presentation, to incontrovertible leader and demander of respect; from ambivalent performer to commanding political thespian.

The contrast in pre and post assassination Jackie is as intriguing as it is insightful, Larraine certainly never feels a duty to pity his central character. Jackie is in control, seizing power from those around her and at times speaking with a near vitriolic condescension to those who over step their bounds. Portman is not afraid to get her hands dirty, digging past the glamorous veneer of her character and unearthing both a grit and sensitivity that brings us close to Jackie, roping us into her state, Portman making her character’s struggles palpable as she dons Jackie’s pink, gore stained suit; a woman both defiant yet wrenched. That suit, in a sense, becomes an extension of Jackie herself, a symbol of the former First Lady and the way she is examined by Larrain; at one time a figure of elegance, now perturbingly reinvented as a figure of anguish; pain, heartache and resoluteness, there for the world to see.

Rating:

3.5/4