11/23/63

Year: 2016
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

Too Cool For School

Year: 2009

Director: Lone Scherfig

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Guess who has tildes on his keyboard and hasn't seen nearly enough Best Picture nominees? ~This guy~ Luckily, this guy also has a Sergio around to make sure he receives culture beyond the mildewy smear of 80's fashion that the slasher genre provides. Our most recent adventure into the fields of high(er) art is 2009's An Education, which has proven to be a pretty good stepping stone, what with its zero dismemberments and thoroughly unambitious visual schema.

It's a little bit comforting to learn that award-winning films can have aesthetics just as fundamentally bare bones as some upper-grade slashers. Although the content is certainly more flashy and artistic, An Education has no ambition to challenge the preset notions of what cinema is and can be aside from being generally pretty.

It is rarely actively bad, although there is some editing that strains to keep characters isolated from one another, distracting me immensely from the drama at hand. Also there's some awful YA garbage voiceover that just doesn't belong in a film like this. But that's about it.

In other news, Carey Mulligan will be young forever.

An Education regales us with the story of Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan), an idealistic (read: irritating hipster) British schoolgirl in Twickenham in 1961. As the town's name might suggest, it's not the sort of place you want to spend your entire life, especially if you're the creative type. Jenny is pushed by her overbearing and hyper-conservative father (Alfred Molina who has basically never played a non-puppy-crushing character in his entire career) toward cello recitals and applying to Oxford. But when she meets a charming and debonair older man named David (Peter Sarsgaard), he whisks her away into a life of high culture and pretentious bons mots.

As the story develops, it is revealed that David might not be exactly who he seems to be. This should be good news, considering that he seems to be a lecherous predator inappropriately lusting after a minor, but unfortunately things get even worse. It wouldn't be An Education if there wasn't an ironically terrible life lesson to be learned.

Like DON'T GET INTO STRANGERS' CARS! Also you're getting in on the wrong side. Damn Brits.

The plot is genuinely quite engaging, so the simple aesthetic isn't necessarily a negative, just a missed opportunity. Although the context of the time period is only used sparingly, there is a strong undercurrent of just how limited the options for young women in the 60's tended to be. When faced with either becoming a secretary, a schoolmarm, or a wife to a rich husband, it's easier to be fooled by someone who is the first person to insist you have taste and show you a glimpse of a life outside your parents' home.

Jenny is drawn to this image of a better life, but she has been so sheltered from the world that she doesn't understand that everything has drawbacks. Every young dreamer wants to go to Paris and watch movies and eat bread and dole out a couple forced showers, but they just can't understand all the bad in the world and Jenny is oh, so stupid.

The drama is tense and exciting at times, but my biggest qualm with the film is that it takes Jenny's side far too freely and willingly. For a great bulk of An Education, a man preying on a juvenile girl is treated with sumptuous respect as a grand love story for the ages. I can appreciate that as a decent try at expressionism, but it's far too off-putting and disagreeable to really become a solid spine for the film.

How romantic! They're running in the rain! I bet his intentions are pure and wholesome!

For what it's worth, the performances at the center of An Education are terrific, especially Carey Mulligan in her breakout starring role, bringing a youthful vibrance and authentic innocence that magnetizes viewers in spite of the character's insipidity. Second best in show would have to be Rosamund Pike in a pre-Gone Girl supporting role, who effortlessly embodies the spirit of Nick Hornby's dry wit.

Overall, thanks to its writing and performers, An Education is a light treat for fans of Oscarbait who want to engage with a story rather than being visually challenged. So basically, it's a great film for people who are tired of the pretention of the whole ceremony, and I'm not about to complain about that. It's just a little too loopy about its subject matter for me to wholeheartedly praise it as a solid unit.

TL;DR: An Education is an engaging tale built upon a strangely atonal foundation with a minimum of aesthetic ambition.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 805