★ 7 / 10
**The four day episodes after the tragic event!**
Reno
**The four day episodes after the tragic event!** An unusual biographical film. I have seen films about JFK, either based on the real or just fiction, but this…
**The four day episodes after the tragic event!**
An unusual biographical film. I have seen films about JFK, either based on the real or just fiction, but this one was entirely focused on his wife. It sets in just weeks after his assassination and soon goes back to that day and the following to tell us how Jacie Kennedy handled the bad time. From tragic event to conducting the final rites, that four days she has to fight for the right decisions. All these revealed by her to a reporter in one of the following week. Remember this film was originally meant for an HBO mini-series and then they turned it into a feature film. That was the risk taken by the filmmakers, later it paid off well.
I never knew who was Jackie, so when I saw Portman's performance in the opening stage, I thought she was overdoing it, the accent and imitation. But after some progress in the story, I got used to it thinking that's how it would be. Yeah, she was excellent and she deserved that Oscars nomination. I wondered what was the source, but after the research I came to know that it was based on the magazine interview by the same reporter you would see in the film. The Chilean director's Hollywood debute. He has done a good job. Also one of the final films of John Hurt in which he was in a small role. Worth a watch for it is being unique and especially revealing some unknown truth behind and/or after death of JFK.
_7/10_
★ 7 / 10
Crisis management... for two hundred million people
greatandimproving
Pablo Larraín's "Jackie" covers the week following the JFK assassination in 1963 and is based on an unpublished interview of Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie…
Pablo Larraín's "Jackie" covers the week following the JFK assassination in 1963 and is based on an unpublished interview of Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) by Life Magazine. Finally released upon her death, the notes were blended with several other interviews to create this screenplay by Noah Oppenheim. For anyone interested in understanding the widespread panic and "what-now" of the time, you'll appreciate this film.The scene ideas are painfully simple, though highly effective. From sharing the impossible news with her kids, to deciding when/how to move out, to asking million-dollar questions of the priest ("What kind of God takes a father away from his two little children?"), the movie includes moments we all know must have happened to Jackie but were buried under the public hysteria around the event itself. As intoned by the funeral planner, "The world's gone mad."Jackie makes small talk in the hearse with Bobby Kennedy while her dead husband (his dead brother... America's dead president) lies in the hulking casket between them, causing our focus to oscillate between the weight of what we hear and what we see. Later, as she staggers through the White House at the end of the longest day of her life - still donning her blood-soaked pink dress that would soon find a permanent home in infamy - Jackie personifies crippling isolation in body and in mind. The non sequiturs that tumble out during these dreadful sequences ("How will we afford to put the kids through school now? Maybe we can sell some of the furniture?") are as heartfelt as they are ludicrous. No matter where she is or what she's doing, Jackie reacts like any commoner would. She just happens to be doing so as the First Lady.The film works because Portman is the most believable Jackie O ever put on screen. From the outset, she is in total control of her confusion, fear, helplessness, exasperation, guilt, long-held duties as a mother, brand-new duties as a *father, alongside her esoteric responsibilities to the nation. Portman puts on an acting clinic by conveying her predicament through nuance. We learn as much about Jackie's state of mind from what she doesn't say as from what she does, because no matter how carefully she speaks or how badly she wishes to be understood, it becomes clear that no words could ever meet the moment.Characters often stare pleadingly into the camera's eyebrow, as if searching for an escape hatch from the audience. The score is populated by discordant whole notes that produce similar unease. Even the photography is at once stunning and unsettling, given the underlying darkness that has eclipsed the light of society. In the end, we feel the world on edge, suspended in time, waiting for normal life to resume. This film concerns the looking back required before it is possible for Jackie Kennedy (or for any of us) to make sense of the loss and start again. The same looking back required "to let them see what they've done."
•••
Wether you're bored or excited, this film is an interesting work of fiction.