Rather than reproduce the reassuring image of gentility and glamour we’ve come to associate with Jacqueline Kennedy, it continually undermines that consensus version of one of the 20th century’s most private public figures.
“Jackie,” in other words, is not a comfort-blanket biopic. Natalie Portman stars as Jackie Kennedy in the days preceding and following her husband's assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s 1962 “Tour of the White House” television special than he confects a fantastical montage in which she staggers in a druggy haze through the East Wing, sipping vodka and trying on couture gowns from a life that is rapidly receding into a dim and idealized past. No sooner has Larraín seamlessly transported Portman into Mrs.
With its combination of rigorously detailed historical recreation, real-life archival footage and purely speculative fantasy - not to mention Portman’s searing physical and psychological performance - “Jackie” creates an unsettling, almost hallucinatory mix of fact and fiction. They portray her as the figure of superb grace, taste and strength that endeared her to millions of Americans but also as a woman with a shrewd sense of history and symbolism who was far more knowing, even calculating, than her demure public persona suggested. Throughout the film, which opens this week in Washington, writer Noah Oppenheim and director Pablo Larraín simultaneously pay tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic persona and challenge it head-on. It is a period of glazed grief, profound anxiety and keen-eyed concern about her late husband’s legacy, which she is shown cementing by choreographing a funeral procession modeled on Abraham Lincoln’s and conducting an interview during which she very deliberately compares the Kennedy era to Camelot. In “Jackie,” Natalie Portman portrays first lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the days immediately following John F. Natalie Portman in “Jackie.” (Stephanie Branchu/Fox Searchlight)
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