What sticks in the mind from Pablo Larrain’s deliberately awkward Jackie is the film’s devastating picture of loneliness. In her now-legendary pink suit, Jacqueline Kennedy, who became a widow just hours earlier, walks alone down a hallway in the White House. Jackie Kennedy was only 34 when all this happened, and embodied in the slight figure of Natalie Portman, she looks like a waif, her eyes stunned and haunted, her walk slow and deliberate. When she turns a corner, her back faces the camera. That’s when you see the bloodstains, dark against the ever-bright suit.
It’s a picture of the devastation of her heart and soul, and throughout the film this character with her little girl voice ricochets back and forth between an overwhelmed child and the composed center of attention for the entire world.
It’s by her own telling. Director Larrain – who is from Chile – and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim build the film around an interview by an unnamed Life Magazine reporter, who interviews Kennedy at what used to be called “the Kennedy compound” in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod, just a week after the assassination. It’s an uneven conversation. Kennedy starts and stops; she sets up the rules from the beginning, and gives herself the right to take back statements, which she then does a number of times. She’s defensive and combative. She’s been the first lady for nearly three years, but now she’s on her own – in charge in an unhappy way – and right on screen she’s learning in the midst of chaos and sadness how to manage PR, or more, how to control what the public will know about herself.
Some of what she tells the reporter is on screen, along with her mind’s pictures of events, her struggle with the people who actually manage the government day to day – and with herself. First she wants a big public ceremony, then not. Then again she wants the full show with Lincoln’s catafalque carrying JFK’s body, and the riderless horse with boots backward in the stirrups.
If you watched the grim affair on television at the time, the movie Jackie feels like an eerie echo from the past. You know how the ceremonies actually took place, while in the movie she’s still trying to articulate what she wants. She worries about the world leaders walking down Pennsylvania Avenue where they could be easily vulnerable to a sniper, but you already know that they did it. And again if you watched at the time, the images have lodged permanently in your memory.
The movie also gets to the psychological and social brutality that followed the assassination. We citizens saw Jackie Kennedy’s startling courage and grace. We didn’t see the arguments with staffers and Secret Service agents over how the funeral and other events might transpire. We didn’t see their resistance and how they never seemed to credit the trauma dumped on this young woman. Hours earlier her husband’s brains had been splattered on her, and then, as she tells the story, she had to prove herself to functionaries and officials.
At the time, the world didn’t see the discussions over Kennedy moving out. The president lives in the White House. Once her husband dies and vice president Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as president, the White House instantly becomes where the Johnsons live, not the Kennedys. The peaceful transfer of power is one of the marvels of American Democracy, but in cases like this one, it’s also harsh and unyielding, even when the people are trying to be nice to each other.
As you’ve likely heard, Natalie Portman’s performance is astounding. More than anything, Portman finds Jackie Kennedy’s vulnerability in private, versus her magnificence in public. The private doubts play against the public elegance. It’s good that Jackie is made by a foreigner. An American filmmaker might have been too immersed in the folklore and the assassination theories and all the other clutter to make a film this precise and focused.
