Jackie (2016)

Whatever this film’s other merits, or lack thereof, you have to admit that its poster is distinctive and iconic. Reviews for this are a bit all over the place but in the end as its Rotten Tomatoes rating manages to hover around the 90% mark, I thought I’d give it a shot. Its director Pablo Larrain is a virtual unknown but it does have some serious names behind and particularly seems like it could be the ideal vehicle for Natalie Portman to transition to more mature roles.

Jackie Kennedy invites an unnamed journalist to tell her side of the story shortly after the assassination of her husband and the subsequent interview serves as a framing device for her recollections seen in flashback. She is imperious in insisting that the journalist only publish what she approves and this desire to control the narrative drives the entire film. For example, immediately after the shooting, she refuses to change out of her bloodied clothes in order to show the cameras the results of the hate campaign against John F. Kennedy in the southern United States. This film cuts her as a lonely figure, with only her brother in law Robert Kennedy and the White House’s secretary Nancy Tuckerman as her pillars of support. Perhaps in order to portray a softer side of her during happier times, it also focuses on her work in refurbishing the White House. The central conflict however is over whether to hold a grand funeral procession for her husband or to make it a quiet affair for the sake of safety and privacy.

Since there’s no easy way to say this, I’ll come right out and say that this is an awful film, a major disappointment on multiple levels. I was shocked when I realized how small its scope is. Jacqueline Bouvier surely had a life before she married into the Kennedy family and she lived a long and eventful life after his death yet this film concerns itself only with the assassination and its immediate aftermath. In fact, its utter lack of ambition makes it terribly boring. One can only tolerate so many shots of Portman wandering by herself in a huge empty house, of grandees offering her condolences, of stalking through cemeteries and all of the pomp and pageantry of a presidential funeral before it all seems terribly repetitive. Then there’s the way that the director makes elementary mistakes by showing his hand. He likes to film Portman going about mundane activities all by herself to reinforce the sense that she’s isolated from other people, but having such a prominent person be left to fend for herself in a huge mansion in the wake of such tragedy feels so unrealistic that it draws attention to the manipulation and makes it ineffective.

Also problematic is how it paints Jackie in a poor light and yet is wishy-washy about it. One scene shows her alone with her brother in law alone with the corpse in the ambulance just after they touch down. She asks the driver if he has heard of James Madison or William McKinley, two other US presidents who had been assassinated while in office, suggesting that she was already concerned with myth-making and shaping how Kennedy would be remembered in history while the corpse was still warm. Her indecision over whether or not to hold a grand ceremony for the funeral, never mind the inconvenience that it causes to everyone as she changes her mind at the last minute, is hard to take seriously. The only interesting thing the film has to say may be that it may be impossible to know who the real Jackie Kennedy was as she declares that she is uninterested in the truth and that everything might be a performance. I suspect however that this might just be screenwriter Noah Oppenheim with no special expertise in history or politics and no deep material to draw from other than an interview in Life magazine throwing up hands and giving up.

My opinion is that this is an awful film with shitty directing and a shitty screenplay. Was it really necessary to include a scene in which she takes off her clothes, has a shower and then changes into a fluffy, sheer nightgown for bed? Was her life subsequent to the assassination unworthy of any mention at all, not even in an afterword? I was even surprised with how lackluster Portman’s performance here is though I’m more inclined to blame an indecisive director here. This is a film that is unworthy of its subject and worse, just by existing, it makes it more difficult for better films about Jackie Kennedy to ever be made.

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