Review: Jackie

Jackie (15)

Chile/USA 2016  100 mins  Dir: Pablo Larrain  Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Greta Gerwig, John Carroll Lynch, Richard E. Grant, Caspar Phillipson

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s first English-language feature isn’t just built around one performance. It also places its star right at the centre of the frame for a good proportion of its running length. So there’s no pressure on Natalie Portman as she portrays one of the most famous women of the 20th century, then. Fortunately, she rises to the occasion magnificently.

For an unconventional bipoic, Jackie boasts a fairly conventional but effective framing device. Just one week after the death of her husband, embattled Jacqueline Kennedy (Portman) is visited at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, by an unnamed, hard-nosed yet broadly sympathetic journalist (Billy Crudup) for a probing interview. Rather than taking the trad birth-to-death chronological approach, Larrain constructs an intimate, visceral mosaic drawn primarily from the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Wisely, this keeps the President himself (Caspar Phillipson) offscreen, but for a couple of flashbacks and the Oliver Stone-style money shot that we only see late in the film. Despite its over-familiarity, this still has the power to shock with the image of the First Lady desperately trying to hold her fatally wounded husband’s head together.

Portman’s raw performance offers a previously unseen Jackie – brittle, tightly coiled and emotionally exhausted while simultaneously remaining very much in charge of the interview (“Don’t think for a moment that I’m going to allow you to publish that,” she tells her interlocutor tartly after an unexpected confession), keenly aware of the difference between public and private personae, and intensely concerned about securing her own legacy as well as that of JFK. One of the key flashbacks is to the then ground-breaking CBS TV special A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F. Kennedy. Broadcast in 1962, this shows an entirely different Jackie – stiff, nervous and rather gauche as she attempts to gently nudge the boundaries of the traditional role of lightweight Presidential wife – underlining just how much more media-savvy she became in less than two years.

Those expected big emotional moments are present and correct, including the “daddy’s not coming home” talk with the kids. But the subtle, intelligent, psychologically complex screenplay by Noah Oppenheim, whose only previous writing credits were for young adult flicks The Maze Runner and Allegiant, serves Portman especially well by avoiding hagiography and underlining the brutal swiftness with which the business of government goes on as LBJ (John Carroll Lynch) is sworn in on Air Force One in front of a traumatised Jackie. Other strands explore her crisis of faith and steely refusal to submit to the guidance of LBJ’s flunkeys when this conflicts with her desire to give JFK a suitably Lincoln-esque funeral. There are also more Camelot references and allusions than you could shake Excalibur at. Sure, it’s essentially a mesmerising one-woman show, but everyone else plays their part to perfection, from the supporting performances – especially by Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy and Greta Gerwig as Jackie’s ever-supportive social secretary and confidante – to Mica Levi’s sparse yet effective score and cinematographer Stephan Fontaine’s lingering, unforgiving close-ups of Jackie’s tear- and blood-stained face.