MOVIE REVIEW: Just 'Jackie'

Natalie Portman brings widowed first lady to life in powerful performance

Natalie Portman is considered one of the leading contenders for the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s Jackie.
Natalie Portman is considered one of the leading contenders for the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s Jackie.

Jackie Kennedy was one of the first icons I can remember.

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Jackie re-creates some iconic images from the aftermath of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this photo, the president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), and the president’s children, Caroline (Sunnie Pelant) and John Jr. (played by twins Aiden and Brody Weinberg), view his funeral procession.

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Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) takes steps to preserve her husband’s legacy in the days after the JFK assassination in Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s Jackie.

She and Mickey Mantle and Elvis Presley were familiars in my preschool days, liable to be confused with relatives and family friends. I remember the Vaughn Meader comedy album The First Family, where an actress named Naomi Brossart impersonated the first lady's whispery mid-Atlantic accent. Maybe it's that recording, a runaway hit (it eventually sold 8 million copies) released at the end of 1962, that informs my memory more than the real Jackie Kennedy, who became an enigmatic figure after the assassination of her husband President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

Jackie

89 Cast: Natalie Portman, Billy Crudup, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Carroll Lynch, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant, Beth Grant

Director: Pablo Larrain

Rating: R, for brief strong violence and some language

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Jackie, Chilean director Pablo Larrain's English-language debut, features Natalie Portman's photorealistic portrayal of Kennedy, mostly in the days following the assassination that brought the curtain down on Camelot and ruined Meader's career as a standup. (He tried to come back as a honky-tonk piano player, billing himself as Abbott Meader.)

While this is a film studded with excellent performances (John Hurt has a nice brief role as a Catholic priest) it is Portman's convincing and empathetic performance -- one that is perhaps the leading candidate for the next Best Actress Oscar -- that makes this cleverly structured and brilliantly restrained film a must-see. Larrain, who recently approached the life of the Chilean diplomat-poet Pablo Neruda in a meta-fictional fashion that focused less on the life of the subject than his legend, here seems determined to focus tightly on the woman within the blood-stained watermelon pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat. While there are a couple of flashbacks, for the most part Jackie concerns itself with her first days of raw, fresh widowhood.

The heart of the film includes a devastating sequence where Jackie, finally back in Washington, alone in the living quarters of the White House, finally strips off the famously besmirched suit (which she insisted on wearing to the hospital and on the flight home, determined to "show them what they had done") and steps into the shower to wash her husband's blood out of her hair before collapsing into bed. It's a scene of heartbreaking intensity and power.

The film is structured around a Life magazine interview Kennedy chronicler Theodore H. White (played here by Billy Crudup, identified in the credits as The Journalist) conducted with Kennedy at Hyannis Port just a week after the assassination. Sliding back and forth in time, Larrain allows the moments to float up like memories, unbidden and in their own time, never coalescing into an Oscar-baity bio-pic but lingering in the mind long after the lights come up. It's an impressionistic portrait that relies on the precise rendering of certain details (the film is technically immaculate when Larrain is impositing Portman as a slightly callower Jackie into the 1961 TV program where she famously led cameras through her redecorated White House).

This is a portrait of a grief-stricken woman desperately working to preserve her husband's legacy even as she faces the harsh uncertainties of celebrity widowhood. She is alternately brittle and steely, a pragmatic if low-key player in her husband's administration who doesn't quite trust his successor, Lyndon Johnson (John Carroll Lynch, best known for playing the prime suspect in David Fincher's Zodiac). She has a hint of imperiousness as well, wearing her privilege lightly yet staring darts through her interrogator when he helpfully suggests that she might do quite well in the television news business.

"Are you giving me professional advice?" she sneers. And in case he doesn't quite get it, she takes a long drag off an unfiltered Camel. "And I don't smoke."

Portman's performance may have been assembled from close study of the available footage, but she manages to present us with more than a superficial portrait of Jackie. Truth is, she doesn't really look that much like photographs of the real Jackie, but we never glimpse the actor working beneath the hairstyle and makeup. She has the smile down, and the reserve, and the voice has exactly the right blend of tentative whisperiness and affectation; that it also evokes Marilyn Monroe adds another layer to the texture.

Working from a nuanced script by Noah Oppenheim, Larrain has fashioned a solemn film that mourns what never came to be more than what was lost. When Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) spits, "We're just the beautiful people," we understand that he means the higher purpose has been lost, that whatever JFK could have achieved has been reduced to sub-Shakespearean tragedy. A grubby rifleman took down their high-minded ideals.

MovieStyle on 01/13/2017

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