I suppose many critics have something of a stock response when it comes to biopics of beloved tragic figures. There’s always some words to the effect of, “(Actor) not only reminds us who the public (historical figure) was, but offers us a glimpse at who the real (insert figure) might have been.” What Natalie Portman achieves here is something much, much deeper than that. In fact I don’t know if it is that at all.
Rather than offer us different “versions” of Jackie Kennedy, Portman, and director Pablo Larraín, conflate and distort the frenzied calibrations of poise, anxiety, power, and grief that made any such compartmentalization of personality impossible in the days following her husband’s assassination. The question explored is not, “Who was the real Jackie Kennedy?” but rather, “Was there a real Jackie Kennedy?”
Bizarrely enough, the comparison that keeps coming to mind is a far cry from a presidential biopic. Nevertheless, throughout my viewing, I could not help but think of another contemporary heroine of American drama: Dolores Abernathy, Evan Rachel Wood’s character on Westworld. It’s a stretch perhaps, but there is something to be ruminated on in comparing the stories of two women, one flesh and blood (and honest-to-goodness real), one robotic, both coming to terms with the revelation of their own artificiality, and having to defend their authenticity against all evidence to the contrary.
Jackie, like Westworld, understands the key to unlocking this distinction: suffering. For anyone expecting a sweeping melodramatic biopic of a stoic and strong First Lady, look elsewhere. Jackie fixates exclusively on the aftermath of the assassination, with the exception of flashbacks to the filming of her iconic tour of the White House from 1961 (flashbacks in which the supernatural skill of Portman’s vocal inflection are on fullest display). We get the story in fragments, non-linearly, largely framed through the device of interview, as The Journalist (Billy Crudup) spars with his prickly subject in her Hyannis Port home over what can and cannot be printed (most of it can’t, as she makes clear).
Jackie affords herself privacy only in her words. The camera almost never moves farther than a medium frame, operating primarily in medium to extreme close-ups. It is here that the true revelation of Portman’s performance comes through. Every movement of muscle is calibrated toward a self-awareness, and self-consciousness, that the eyes that watch her are mere inches away. The oppressive maintenance of persona is manifested in the camera’s oppressive refusal to simply leave her alone.
The confidence of the film’s intimacy only rarely verges on arrogance, in moments where I felt the script went a bridge too far in making declarations over who the woman was. Most frustrating to me was the requisite monologue regarding her husband’s affairs, a fine speech made finer by Portman, but undermined by a somewhat indelicate use of Jackie’s real words: “There are two kinds of women: those who want power in the world, and those who want power in bed.” I longed then for a beat in which Jackie, and we the audience, were forced to consider that she does not comfortably fit either description, but no such examination was afforded.
That said, this scene, and the other requisite sequence of Jackie wandering drunk and stoned through the White House, adorned in her beautiful things, were the only moments that indulged true melodrama, and for this I cannot blame Larraín. Jackie is, after all, not only an icon of Americana, but an icon of camp, and Larraín is most precise in his insistence that both realities are captured.
What remains is a meditation on death and a summons to life. The journey is of a heroine who has spent nearly her entire adulthood in a trapped state of grief, forbidden from expressing it, by the public, by herself. Her calling at first seems to be to uphold a legacy, but as she looks out the window of her motorcade at shop windows displaying mannequin replicas of her funeral outfits, like Dolores, her call to action becomes clear: she must become the legacy.
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