Director: Pablo Larraín
Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: biopics are not my genre. But I can find it in my heart to respect any movie in any genre if it’s well made and tells a good story. But if you’re a biopic nut and intensely invested in the well-being of Jackie, Pablo Larraín’s film about Jackie Kennedy in the week following her husband’s assassination, you may want to chalk up what I have to say to a good old-fashioned bias. Because this inevitably Oscar-nominated film is one of the least deserving of that honor that I’ve seen in years.
And I saw The Revenant!
For what it’s worth, Jackie tells a story with interesting goals. Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) is caught up in a flurry of tangled emotions after the assassination of her husband John (Caspar Phillipson). These flashbacks are intercut with her interview with a journalist (Billy Crudup) a week alter. As she waffles about the funeral arrangements, her own safety, and her husband’s legacy, she struggles with the sad truth that, with her husband gone, the government has no more use for her.
I do love me some feminist politics in my movies.
Nobody is pretending that Jackie is shooting for anything other than a Best Actress nomination, and that’s probably a good thing. Natalie Portman is by far the best asset of the entire project, although she’s doing a great imitation rather than giving a particularly stunning performance. To be fair, the script really doesn’t give her much to do other than constantly reassert her grief, either in bouts of gorgeous, half-composed weeping or shattered flightiness. She does it well, but there’s not really anything more to the role. A major theme of the film is the difference between reality and the fairy tale figures we see on the news, but other than certain moments of shrewd calculation, we’re not given much of a glimpse into Jackie’s inner life.
But who knows. Maybe this is a piercingly accurate portrayal and I just have a problem with Jackie Kennedy herself. Let’s move onto the things we can all agree are terrible, like the score. I don’t blame Under the Skin composter Mica Levi for turning in a piece so similar to her standout debut, but the atonal shrieking of the orchestra shatters the tone. Jackie is a stone-faced biopic, not a gothic horror film. These wailing strings would have Bernard Hermann asking her to tone it down a bit.
But the banshee parade that marks the bulk of the movie sounds like Phillip Glass compared to the maudlin piccolo suite that accompanies the scene where Jackie informs her children of their father’s death. It’s like having a gallon of syrup upended over your head, sticky and oversweet in all the wrong ways.
And it has even less nutritional value.
Nothing else in Jackie is as obnoxious as the score, but most of it is just as self-confidently misguided. Larraín has a bizarre predilection for tight close-ups and nothing else, locking his frame onto whoever’s talking and interring any energy that has built up until this point. Which isn’t much, considering that Jackie is an ice-cold biopic with a dedication to crisp, starched period detail over its characters themselves.
It’s not that Jackie doesn’t try. Oh boy does it try. It just leans hard on its script, which is a mushy, didactic slog if there ever was one. There is some pleasant humor in the easy chemistry between Portman and Crudup in the interview scenes, but the rest of the film is a conveyor belt of deep, thematic conversation setpieces. All of this is to be expected, even welcomed, in a film with this kind of subject matter, but they had to go ahead and splice in half a dozen scenes of Jackie on a lakeside taking to a priest (a sleepwalking John Hurt), a pacing-obliterating set of moments that shatters any pretense of subtlety.
Not that we needed to be reminded that this movie isn’t subtle. After their demure avoidance of the actual assassination in the opening hour, the filmmakers decide to stomp on the gas and launch into a faithfully grisly restaging of the event. Being me, I rarely find reason to argue against an infusion of gore in my movies (I still think Citizen Kane could have been spiced up with a couple beheadings), but this is just crass. They’ve already handled the subject using elegant, harrowing implication, and this far into the movie, seeing JFK’s brains sliding out of his head just doesn’t add anything to our understanding of Jackie’s mindset, the only thing that matters in this film.
This is a symptom of a larger problem. Jackie doesn’t know when to stop. It thinks it’s telling an important story (and it would have been if it paid any attention to its own themes), but it’s just a pale imitation of what a biopic should be. Natalie Portman will get her nomination and she’ll deserve it, but Jackie doesn’t deserve a single paying eyeball to witness its overwrought trainwreck.
TL;DR: Jackie is a ludicrously overwrought biopic with a solid theme that it totally ignores.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 885
I think the final word could go to Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy Jr.. When asked in a 1992 interview, he seemed to be indifferent to the countless theories surrounding his father's death. He stated his reason was "because that's not entertainment for me… people, historians, filmmakers…are going to take time and money studying (my father's death)." He cared little about the controversy on the event, stating that regardless of the truth (even if it one day, evidence came out disputing the offical version of events), it would not bring his father back.
ReplyDeleteOver the recent years, one of the biggest debates surrounds high quality frames of two films taken by Cameramen James Darnell and Dave Wiegman to support a theory that a man standing on the Depository front steps during the assassination, referred to as "prayer man", was Lee Harvey Oswald (which if true, would mean he did NOT fire a shot in Dealey Plaza that day).
I read the two books, Stan Dane's book, “Prayer Man: The Exoneration of Lee Harvey Oswald”, and “Prayer Man: More Than a Fuzzy Picture” by Bart Kamp, which look at the unidentified man who was filmed by Dave Wiegman, Jr., of NBC, and James Darnell of WBAP-TV, standing on the Depository front steps during the JFK assassination, referred to as "prayer man", theorised by some to be Lee Harvey Oswald and I have to say both deliver a therotical but logical case that the PM was LHO.
I hasten to add I am neither pro lone gunman or pro conspiracy in regards to JFK controversy. Personnaly, I regard myself a strong believer in “innocent until proven guilty”, which is to say that I will never definitively state that Lee Harvey Oswald or anybody else was responsible for the assassination. There are too many missing puzzle pieces and most of the evidence is circumstantial rather than direct. As someone got interested in the JFK case since 2010, I have been pro-conspiracy and pro-lone gunman at times, and by the mid 2010s, I began remaining on the neutral side, having no opinion, though I’m prepared to accept the WC findings. There’s just something I cannot put my finger on that is preventing me from calling it a lone gunman and calling it a day. I think the PM theory made me wake up to it. If the films are released and it turns out not to be Lee, then fine, I eat my words and accept the lone gunman conclusion. Indeed, I myself admit that a small part is unsure but unless/until high quality copies of the Darnell film are released in my lifetime and can confirm or eliminate Oswald as PM, this theory is the only JFK Conspiracy Theory that could be true IMHO. It deserves more attention and those films need to be released to end the debate or resolve it.