Good interpreter, horrible storytelling

Rating: 3/10 (12 February 2017)

This is a good example of why chronological storytelling sometimes is the best option. The film covers a short time-frame, a single week from the assassination of Kennedy to Jackie moving out of the White House after the funeral. To add some "breathing space", the film is interspersed with images from the documentary of the "guided tour" of the White House made by Jackie in 1962.
To establish and maintain a proper mood, the story could have followed the events, opening with a short introduction from the first happy days of the presidency, to the making of the documentary. The landing in Dallas, the shock of the assassination, and the nightmarish week of the funeral would have made Jackie's fall from the grace even more poignant.
The film could have been wrapped up by the interview she gave a week after JFK funeral, when she regained a glacial composure. What we have instead is the interview opening the film, with a snobbish Jackie icily answering impertinent questions from a report she herself invited, followed by an endless jumping back and forward in time. Despite of this, the story feels claustrophobic and drags along at snail pace.
Further ruining the film are: too many close-ups of Portman's face; a very long scene of Jackie drinking, smoking and popping pills all alone in a chilling White House that resembles the bedroom in "2001: a Space Odyssey"; the overbearing, funereal music to underscore the obvious (an assassination and organizing a funeral are hardly happy occasions) and the useless scenes with the religious counselor. Poor John Hurt is given lines of utter triviality, that offers no comfort at all.
It could have been a decent movie, but the editing destroyed it for me. Maybe filmmakers assume that tangled time-lines are the only way to go in contemporary cinema or maybe there is a law I am not aware of against chronological storytelling.