Jackie (15)

IN a piquant piece of timing, the start of America’s most questionable presidency coincides with a reminder of what many regard as one of its greatest, if short-lived, that of John F Kennedy. Though as the title suggests, Jackie is not so much about JFK as his First Lady, an icon in her own right, now given a bold re-evaluation centre-stage. The result is a fascinating, profound, brilliantly made film about an extraordinary woman.

It’s hard to fathom what it must have been like for Jackie Kennedy, sitting beside her husband in the infamous Dallas motorcade in 1963, as two bullets tore into him. The poor woman literally held parts of his brain in her hand as the car sped, vainly, towards the hospital.

The film considers the week that followed, as Jackie was forced to deal with her grief in the public eye, while also worrying for her young children and contending with the political repercussions, funeral arrangements and the imminent need to leave her White House home.

While providing a probing portrait of grief, the film also has a thesis: that in the aftermath of the assassination it was Jackie, with her keen sense of history, who sought to protect her husband’s political legacy.

The narrative is an inquiring, non-linear weave between the assassination itself and different moments in the days that followed – in the hospital, in Air Force One, where Lyndon B Johnson is immediately sworn in as the new president, in Washington, where Jackie fights to turn her husband’s funeral into a spectacle on a par with Abraham Lincoln’s.

We see her roaming the rooms of the White House, alone and in despair, and in conversations with her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and a priest (John Hurt). And the spine of this free-from structure is her frosty, jousting interview with a journalist (Billy Cudrup), loosely based on the real interview Kennedy gave to Life magazine, in which it was she who introduced the image of her husband’s administration as a Camelot – idealistic and pure – which has become indelibly associated with JFK’s short tenure.

Writer Noah Oppenheim has come up with a supremely smart screenplay, which considers the crosscurrents between fame, history, the media, legacy and actual achievement. But the film is given its unusual tone and energy by its director and star.

Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who came to fame through his trilogy about the Pinochet dictatorship, brings a real cinematic flourish to proceedings, as well as his singular gift for creating strange, uneasy atmospheres. And as with the last of the trilogy, No, he blurs the lines between archive footage and recreations of events – the assassination, a TV tour of the White House – in a way that draws us even more deeply into the past.

Cameraman Stéphane Fontaine often seems to be in a magical dance with Portman, notably as Jackie wanders the White House, still wearing her blood-splattered dress. At other times, director, cameraman and actress fashion some emotionally devastating close-ups; one, in which Jackie wipes her face after the shooting, blood and tears smeared together, compares with some of the most compelling images in cinema.

Portman pips her previous career-high, the Oscar-winning turn as the ballerina in Black Swan, with a performance that eerily recreates Jackie’s breathy whisper and simultaneously conveys grief, fear, confusion, anger and steely will. Refreshingly, she’s not playing for sympathy. She doesn’t need to. Driven by Oppenheim’s script, Larraín’s skill and Portman’s fierce intelligence, Jackie exerts a vice-like grip on the mind and senses.

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