Jackie (2016)

Directed by Pablo Larraín. Starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt, John Carroll Lynch, Richard E. Grant, Caspar Phillipson. [R]

The days and weeks after the Kennedy assassination were, of course, a personally and privately tumultuous time for grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy (Portman), but this dramatization of those days and weeks never finds a firm footing or guiding viewpoint. Plagued by grief and guilt, yet she always appears outwardly poised and controlled, even when she seemed fragile enough to shatter into a thousand pieces. This biopic doesn’t let her shatter, but it does hammer a few cracks into the façade, and the viewer has to attach his or her own meaning since Portman doesn’t let us in. It’s the sort of performance destined to earn acclaim through spot-on impersonation, but since she doesn’t quite sound right (close, but no pink Chanel suit), it comes off as terribly mannered and self-conscious, a voice that doesn’t fit a face too famous to fully transform into another very famous face. Meanwhile, the interview framing device and chronologically-indistinct snapshot approach doesn’t inspire great interest or sympathy in the subject, keeping us as distant to the public woman’s bravery and secrecy as she evidently wanted to keep us. There are only brief moments when we feel for her—it’s hard to be stone-hearted in the face of a tiny coffin being lowered back into the ground—but small victories are not enough to cherish in a movie trying so hard to be wrenching and revelatory. Although Crudup’s journalist (conducting the interview in the framing segments) is a composite of multiple figures and gets credited solely as “The Journalist”, he was primarily inspired by Theodore H. White from LIFE Magazine.

47/100