Fox Searchlight
Some people go through different stages in their career, and some flame out early. Natalie Portman burst onto the scene with a fantastic performance (at only 12 years old) in Leon: The Professional before slowly building a resume of many genres of movies, but a lot of romance types. The Star Wars prequels put her in a bad place (unfairly), but then she got an Oscar nomination in 2004 for Closer. She finally won for Black Swan (fairly), but hasn’t really had a super great movie since then.
And now she’s the front runner for a second Oscar.
Jackie comes from director Pablo Larrain and is written by Noah Oppenheim, and is an exploration of Jackie Kennedy, specifically after the events of JFK’s assassination. The movie moves between a few points in time to create a difficult, engrossing, complicated environment. We see Jackie as she gives her famous tour of the White House in 1962, which was televised at the time. The movie is shockingly accurate, and immediately the way Natalie Portman plays Jackie is at times almost unnervingly accurate.
She gets down the voice and the movement, but also delves into the differences between the public and private personae of the former First Lady. This is a key theme of the movie, which demonstrates this subtly and overtly at times. The movie also shows an interview between Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) from Life magazine that famously was utilized by Jackie to connect the Kennedy presidency with Camelot.
In here we see the tricky balance between artifice and truth, but this is when she speaks. There are also scenes directly of the assassination and the aftermath, the complications and politics, the funeral arrangements and the trauma. Throughout, a pulsating, dissonant score (by Mica Levi who did the brilliant score for Under the Skin) and a camera that blurs through time keeps us off balance.
Snippets of other characters show up, like Greta Gerwig as Jackie’s aide Nancy Tuckerman, John Carroll Lynch as LBJ, and Peter Sarsgaard as Robert Kennedy. LBJ and Robert Kennedy aren’t really vital impressions, but supporting characters in the point of view about one person. Even JFK himself (played fine by Caspar Phillipson) is a bit player in this movie that is about his wife.
Instead it’s a showcase of truly impressive acting, with Natalie Portman really putting in a performance that covers it all. A show within a show, and a persona covering a persona. We see her in the midst of her deepest pain as she moves like a ghost in a White House without people. She shows great expressiveness in her silent moments, and wry pain when she speaks.
This movie tries to throw you off balance, and for me, it was a successful experiment. But I could see that it wouldn’t work for some people. It’s also a beautiful movie, stepped in misery and pain, but beautiful nonetheless.
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