I was sitting on a plane once next to two women gazing at a magazine cover featuring Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “She fascinates me,” one woman said, rather dramatically. The other said, “I don’t find her interesting at all.”
I recall these two women sometimes when I think of Camelot’s First Lady. Jackie Kennedy was and is a part of American iconography — but is there anything actually interesting about her?
Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie” is an offbeat film that looks at Mrs. Kennedy (played by Natalie Portman) in the immediacy of her husband’s murder and its aftermath. It’s an ambiguous portrait of someone who showed grace in the midst of tragedy, but who also had an innate grasp of how to create an image.
Both tendencies can be seen in her remarkable decision to keep on the blood-spattered pink dress she was wearing on the day of the assassination (“Let them see what they did,” she said) and in her shrewd creation of the idea of Camelot: In an interview Jackie granted just a week after the assassination (Billy Crudup plays the journalist), she invoked the Broadway musical about Arthurian legends that had been a hit during the JFK administration.
Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay doles out scenes in puzzle-like fashion, gathered around this interview. It’s not a biopic, nor does it feel like a Lifetime movie. Chilean director Larrain makes challenging, spiritually tangled films (“The Club,” “No”) that contain no sentimental syrup.
Same here, but Larrain and Portman certainly make you feel for Jackie. Portman’s scarily composed performance is laser-focused, an act of empathy without tears — that breathy voice disguises a strong will. Larrain often films Jackie from a distance, showing how overwhelmed she looks in the cavernous, now-vacant White House.
Portman is very much the center of the movie, but Peter Sarsgaard plays Robert Kennedy as a political operator who also is a worried brother-in-law. (He believes a public funeral walk will expose Jackie and the children to possible gunfire.)
The film gives a strong sense of how many immediate problems must be solved after the murder of a president, and how great the burden is on the widow.
John Carroll Lynch and Beth Grant give fine turns as Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Greta Gerwig is gawky and touching as Jackie’s assistant, and John Hurt is splendid as a trusted family priest — all of them are trying to accommodate the widow, but also move the process along.
This movie is unusual — from the jigsaw structure to Mica Levi’s (“Under the Skin”) eerie music to Portman’s tough performance. It’s a peek into a person of great fame and some mystery. The film leaves the enigma intact.
“Jackie” (3 ½ stars)
Natalie Portman gives a laser-focused performance as Jackie Kennedy, seen in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s murder. It’s an unusual film — Portman and director Pablo Larrain allow no sentimentality, and we see how the government has to keep working, even in the midst of tragedy.
Rating: R, for violence
Showing: Guild 45th
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