Jackie, film review: It is in every respect remarkable

Natalie Portman should take a second Oscar for her astounding performance as grieving Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination
David Sexton20 January 2017

No release could be more timely. Today a new President of the United States is inaugurated. Do we implicitly honour him? Do we know what is true about him and what’s an image?

Most political biopics, tracing stories we already know, offering impersonation, fail to come alive in the most basic way. Jackie, however, is unlike any previous film in the way it presents extremely well-known public events: the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and his state funeral at Arlington cemetery three days later, through the eyes of his widow Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, played by Natalie Portman.

Such a clunker could have been made of this story. Jackie, however, is the most radical re-envisioning of it — all from the point of view of Jackie herself — imaginable. It is in every respect remarkable: so original, enveloping and moving. Seeing it the first time at the Toronto Film Festival I was simply stunned by it, overwhelmed primarily by Jackie’s grief; seeing it again this week I was just as moved but realised more how much political edge it has as well, in the way it examines how, in these few days, she moulded the myth and legacy of her husband, moving the whole political process towards the predominance of image that we know now.

Initially, the film, scripted by Noah Oppenheim (a journalist who oversaw the Today show on NBC News but whose screenplay credits have been more modest) seems to adopt a fairly conventional format.

Jackie, in pictures

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One week after the assassination Jackie gave a famous interview at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, to a journalist from Life called Theodore H White (here, named just “the journalist”, excellently played by Billy Crudup, initially over-confident in his approach to her but soon realising she is a formidable manipulator herself). Here she first created the myth that Kennedy’s presidency had been like King Arthur’s Camelot as per the musical (“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot”).

Oppenheim and the director Pablo Lorrain (Chilean, 40, previously known for No, about the resistance to Pinochet, and Neruda, about the last days of the Chilean poet, both made with Gael Garcia Bernal, this is his first English-language film) use this interview as a framing device but within it they have given themselves almost kaleidoscopic freedom to move back and forth in Jackie’s story, so that movement feels as dreamlike and as phantasmagoric as those days must have been for Jackie herself. (Larrain evidently told Portman each scene stood alone and they could be edited together in any order.)

Woman in black: Natalie Portman gives a star’s turn as Jackie Kennedy 

Early in the interview the journalist tells Jackie that history is all we have and she swiftly corrects him: “Had. We have television now.” We return to her own famous television show of 1962, in which she nervously presented her restoration of the White House, the archive footage being invisibly joined with the new. “Objects and artefacts last far longer than people,” she says.

She knows exactly what the newsman wants: “a moment-by-moment account, the sound the bullet made when it collided with my husband’s skull”. And she gives it to him graphically: “I see a piece of his skull come off — it was flesh-coloured, not white — and I see his brains in my lap.” Then sharply she takes it away again: “Don’t think for one second that I’m going to let you publish that.”

And then we are into the moment in the film: Jackie, wiping her bloodied face in a mirror in the presidential plane, coming out to witness the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson, stepping away from it. Sitting next to the casket, she insists on knowing everything, what exactly an autopsy entails: “I want all the details, I’m his wife — or whatever I am now.”

Back in the White House she eventually drags off that iconic candy-pink, blood-spattered Chanel suit and showers — and more blood runs out of her hair in a moment that belongs to a horror film. We see her arranging the funeral, modelling it on Lincoln’s. We see her telling her daughter “Caroline, you can be brave, you can be a soldier — a very bad man hurt daddy,” and seeking understanding from a priest (John Hurt, marvellously craggy and unimpressed). When he says that God is everywhere and she asks if He was in the bullet that killed Jack, he replies: “Absolutely.”

And above all, we see her on her own, stricken and lost, wandering through the White House she shaped, drinking, smoking, swallowing pills, trying on one dress and piece of jewellery after another, no longer knowing who she can be, a ghost in her own life. This is a phenomenally powerful sequence: the woman who had composed such a powerful public image now stripped back to who she can be when nobody is there to see her.

“Nothing is ever mine, not to keep anyway,” she tells the journalist. Nor is the truth about her marriage to the famously unfaithful JFK elided. “He was always coming back to us, his beloved family — and I don’t smoke,” she says, smoking, staring him down. Again: “I lost Jack somewhere — what was real, what was performance.”

The secondary actors here are excellent, notably Peter Sarsgaard as Robert Kennedy, tough yet seeming in his pallor already somehow foredoomed to the assassination that awaited him, and Greta Gerwig as Jackie’s tender assistant and friend, Nancy. Yet this film is made by the most astounding performance by Portman, who simply disappears into Jackie, so that you never think of her as acting but are just swallowed up into her grief, her confusion and anger, her determination and intelligence.

The paradox about such particularity is that it universalises such grief too: this is a film not just about this historic event but about what the shock of sudden and violent bereavement and total loss of position might be like for any of us.

Portman has perfected Jackie’s strange crisp, twangy accent and she is, of course, grippingly beautiful — but it is the look in her eyes that rules, sometimes allowing us to glimpse exactly what is going on within her and sometimes staring us too out completely. She should surely take a second Oscar for this tour de force.

What lets us see it so well is the brilliant cinematography by Stephane Fontane (whose work includes Audiard’s A Prophet, Rust and Bone and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as well as Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming Elle). His camera is on constant close-up on Jackie throughout, moving with her and around her, as if itself emotionally involved, almost part of her, rather than an onlooker. The editing together of this non-chronological narrative by Sebastian Sepulveda, jumping around but always coherently and with its own emotional logic, is exemplary too.

Add to that the incredible score by the young British composer Mica Levi, which is nothing like what you would expect from a political biopic, perhaps more from some kind of body-horror film like her previous work for Under the Skin. Strangely warped and unsettled chords, sometimes plangent, sometimes almost aghast, constantly suggest slippage and uncertainty. It’s a separate voice to what we see on the screen — which was cut to it, rather than the reverse — and it adds immensely to the impact. This is film as total creation, not illustration and anecdote.

So: a great and apt movie. If you’re dithering about going to La La Land and would take my advice, please see this instead.

Cert 15, 100 mins

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