Jackie – review

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Jackie reenacts JFK’s assassination in Dallas, 1963 through the eyes of the President’s youthful wife and the United States First Lady, Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). The film focuses on the immediate aftermath of this catastrophic incident in America’s history and more specifically, on the way in which Jackie maintained her elegant stoicism throughout the flurry of national and global interest. Portman is a fine actress and the director, Pablo Larrain, clearly uses that to his advantage. She portrays Mrs Kennedy as a calculated woman, keenly aware of the influence that her behaviour at this time will have on the way this event is conceptualized. It is interesting to watch her facade of passivity crumble and then rearrange as she is interviewed by a journalist for the well-known LIFE piece. The film is shot in a rather direct fashion, with the speaker in any given scene placed in the very centre of the shot as if they are directing their address to the audience. Larrain’s straight-forward mode of filming is often difficult to digest, and for me at least, was an attempt to distract from the banal plot.

Jackie simply re-examines a story that we all know too well. And while there are moments of shocking honesty (one in which Jackie frantically rubs off her husband’s blood from her face and neck hours after she returns on board the plane to DC), these are few and far between. We learn more about Jackie’s process of grieving and her gradual understanding of life beyond the White House and what this means for her children through her conversations with the journalist in frequent flash forwards and through her interactions with a solemn John Hurt, playing a Catholic priest. The latter of these scenes I find rather exasperating to watch as Hurt drones on about the meaning of life. It is all too saccharine.

In defence of Larrain’s directing and Oppenheim’s script, the encompassing theme of the film, that being the idea that the truth is almost impossible to decipher in any form, was profoundly thoughtful and deserved more development, which it unfortunately didn’t receive. The set design, the costumes and the score are all incredibly well crafted. However, Jackie  does not rise above the waves of average biopics of recent years. It feels tired under the weight of JFK’s historic legacy.

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