It’s a big ask when the weight of any movie is meant to be carried by countless close-ups of its central character – in this case Jackie Kennedy, the tragic widow of president John F Kennedy, assassinated in November 1963. Natalie Portman is up for the gig – her copycat speech of the first lady is in every way as impressive as costume and makeup’s ‘look’ – but there is something ‘not there’, something unbridgeably remote about the woman she portrays, which is in all likelihood exactly what she intended. With constant time-jumps, some of which are not always immediately comprehensible, Chilean director Pablo Larraín splits his story between a pliable journo’s (Billy Crudup) one-on-one interview with Jackie only days after that fateful day in Dallas, and her reactions to the ghastly event that changed her life (and American history). Portman’s is an icy performance – her Jackie is detached and self-absorbed, always image conscious, with a façade that hints at being naïve, if not a little simple – though not so simple that she is unable to censor what might be written about her. All the time, however, it must be remembered that barely hours beforehand she had seen her beloved husband’s brains blown out while they were sitting together in the presidential limo (it is an horrific scene). How would anybody behave in those circumstances? It is an intensely personal and claustrophobic film, notwithstanding the contrary (and lasting) legacy of Jacqueline Bouvier/Kennedy/Onassis as a prototype of the modern celebrity icon. The famous TV program in which she took viewers into the White House is cleverly re-staged and related to her obsessive concerns with her own place in the grand scheme of things as she went about creating ‘Camelot’ in Washington. Meticulous care is taken in art direction and period, which makes it all the more difficult to accept the casting of Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy – he does not look (or sound) a bit like him and in a movie so painstaking in detail it was enough to throw me.
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