Jackie

~ Live & Learn

jackie-movie-natalie-portman

Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence. She is stiff the way celebrated women were in the early 1960s, in her comportment as well as her hair. […]

Natalie Portman’s portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy during and immediately after her husband’s assassination rises above impersonation to an eerie kind of incarnation: She’s got the voice, the look and a devastated spirit that still has plenty of steel…For those who remember exactly where they were when the news came in, some of these blood-soaked images retain the power to evoke astonishingly strong feelings of shock and grief. This is by way of saying I may have seen a different “Jackie” than others will see, one that made me recoil at replayed moments of horror, and sometimes squirm like a voyeur. But Pablo Larraín has made a strangely conflicted film that portrays Jackie as an obsessive mythmaker and keeper of the flame—an ironic, provocative approach—yet celebrates the Camelot myth in the process. […]

Does it also feel right that the film, following Jackie back to the White House after the flight from Dallas, tracks her solitary wanderings through silent, empty rooms and into the shower, where she washes her husband’s dried blood from her body? No and yes. Some of that left me feeling queasy, an accessory to a break-in on an icon’s privacy. All the same, following her in the hours after the assassination is a terrific idea for part of a movie, a part that’s irresistible to watch…

The film’s contradictions intersect most vividly toward the end, when Jackie, passing a department store in a limousine, sees mannequins in a succession of windows wearing her signature dresses. That could also be taken as ironic—the architect of the image-building project has become its surviving subject. But the scene, like so much in the film, plays sentimentally. She is ruefully, tragically alone…

~ Joe Morgenstern, excerpts from ‘Jackie’ Review: The Woman and the Myth. Natalie Portman stars as Jacqueline Kennedy in the period during and after her husband’s assassination

To watch official movie trailer: Jackie, Official Trailer

Photo: traileraddict.com

26 thoughts on “Jackie”

  1. I know this is getting Oscar buzz – and yet I won’t see it. The whole thing feels like it sensationalizes a tipping point in our history. Whether or not it really was Camelot, this wife lost her husband in a horrifying way, this country lost its President which was unfathomable in our hopeful little world, and it was the beginning of the terrifying triad of loss (JKF, RFK, MLK) – and in my view, represented. Should the intimate moments of solitary grief be re-enacted? Is it intrusive? Right now, while some of us feel like those scabs have been ripped off – it feels like all our private horrors have been put up on the screen. Sorry – too much coffee.

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  6. The world lost JFK the year before I was born, but my parents and grandparents spoke of him so often and with such reverence that it’s tough for me to remember that I *wasn’t* on this earth when this horrific act took place. I’m a big fan of Natalie Portman — just watched ‘Black Swan’ again the other night, a tour de force — but don’t know whether I’ll see this film. Mimi’s comments resonate….

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  7. I was in high school standing in line at lunch hour waiting to use the phone when someone said Kennedy had been shot. I phoned my sister who was home from school and she said it was true. We were all in shock. Jacqueline Kennedy’s grace during that time amazed and inspired us all.

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  10. I love Natalie Portman and all her outstanding work. Haven’t yet seen the film, but was in 5th grade when all the teachers in adjacent rooms flooded into ours, for we had the TV for Spanish lessons from Senorita Yvette DelPrado. I remember one teacher rushing in, “Turn on the TV! The President’s been shot!” I recall the looks on adult faces, could feel the distress. It was indeed stamped in memory from that date forward. Fast forward, months later: my mom and I took a drive (down to Chinatown? to Hollywood? the details are unclear), and were quite near the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was shot. Again, the memory of the sensations going through the public are recorded in memory, as we swung around to get a closer view. Those were crazy times.

    And once again we are living in the most unstable times, ever. So much chaos in people’s actions, words and gazes. There is madness there, but also the opportunity for the Collective to awaken, perhaps as never before.

    Aloha, David.

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  11. I remember where I was during that time of great sadness and disbelief. At the age of 5, I watched from the den floor as the horse drawn carriage rode by and John John saluted. My mother cried and as a young girl named Carolyn, I bonded with Caroline in a way that still resonates today.
    The description of this movie is compelling but I believe it would be too painful to watch scenes that I have always vividly imagined.
    The timing for this movie is impeccable.
    Thank you for sharing, David.

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  12. Great review thank you. Natalie Portman gives an unforgetable performance about one of the most memorable events of the last century. Her capacity to portray the multiple personalities embedded within the persona of Jackie in the midst and aftermath of JFK’s assasination is truly extraordinary.

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