Jackie (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆

Jackie (2016) – P. Larraín

Less a portrait of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and more a flashbulb memory of trauma and grief, the film documents the hours and days following JFK’s assassination through the eyes of his widow.  Natalie Portman dominates the film as Jackie, seen in the motorcade, immediately afterward on Air Force One, in a subsequent interview with a journalist, talking with a priest (John Hurt), and negotiating the details of the funeral with Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard); Portman is by turns zombified, intense, cold, contradictory, and dignified.  A good performance.  But is she Jackie? (And is the script “true”?). It is hard for me to say given that the events in question took place four years before I was born. The entire JFK era seems a shadowy past that affected our parents deeply but could never really be grasped in the same way by my generation.  Replicating things here may be a triumph of period art direction/set decoration and mimicry, but the emotional weight of the specific event still seems elusive.  Instead, cued by the sombre and woozy music (verging on the psychodrama soundtrack), the generalized experience of trauma, death, and carrying on comes through more clearly.  And I guess, in some respects, that’s why everything seems a blur.