Jackie: A First Lady's Legacy

About fifteen minutes into watching Jackie, you can't doubt why Natalie Portman has received so many nominations for this performance. She owns this movie from start to finish and while I knew very little about Jacqueline Kennedy at the beginning, I certainly felt like I knew her inside and out by the end.

Like the best biopics, Jackie does not go over a sweeping timeline but instead focuses very precisely on John F. Kennedy's assassination and the days leading up to his funeral. The script by Noah Oppenheim is incredibly clever, propelling the story along in an engaging fashion while giving you an insight into Jackie's mind during this tumultuous time. We gather up her life story in bits and pieces through her conversations with a journalist (Billy Crudup), brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy (Peter Saarsgard), social secretary Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), and a priest (John Hurt). She is fragile and firm in equal measure, still in shock after cradling her husband's bloodied skull in her lap, but determined that he must have a true presidential legacy and be remembered for all of the great things that he wanted to accomplish before his life was tragically cut short.

One of the most difficult things to portray on film is a person's mental state. Much depends on the actor, but when the whole point of Jackie is that she retains her outward composure, how do you capture her inner turmoil? Director Pablo Lorrain employs some shaky camerawork, close-ups that let you look right past Portman's outward calm and into her brimming eyes, and scenes where Jackie dazedly wanders around the White House wearing multiple outfits as she contemplates how her life is crashing down around her. But of course, the true indication of Jackie's mental state is the Oscar-nominated score by composer, Mica Levi. It is a jangly, disturbing soundscape that occasionally feels like a traditional score and will then suddenly swoop into unanticipated dissonance that throws you off-kilter. It's rather extraordinary and is an excellent example of how music can add a whole other dimension to a motion picture.

Jackie is a compelling movie, featuring a stunning central performance and a well-paced story that goes behind the scenes of one of the most infamous moments in modern history. Given a choice between this and Hacksaw Ridge, Jackie is the kind of biopic I prefer, intense in its specificity, yet delving so deep into the character that you feel like you have experienced a lifetime with them. The movie is tightly edited and unconventionally narrated, jumping back and forth in time to give you the same sense of unreality that Jackie Kennedy must have been experiencing as these events unfolded. It is well-directed, impeccably scored, and wonderfully-acted. See it.