Both arresting and odd

Rating: 6/10 (1 March 2017)

When making a movie, book, etc. about the Kennedy White House you are traveling over a well beaten path. It is almost hubristic to even attempt yet another movie about Kennedy. Yet this movie, in spite of flaws, manages to pull it off. It is not really a biopic. It is not history. As a person who has read ad nauseum about the political working of this Administration, it's triumphs and pratfalls, and it's conclusion in such a tragedy that the nation itself is still dealing with it 50 years later, I found the film hard to handle. "That did not happen that way." I would find myself thinking. Or "He would never have asked that question, nor would she have ever answered it."
Performances were mediocre with the exception of Portman and John Hurt. Jacki K. had a very difficult voice to hit. She had a public voice and a private voice. She had to control her accent in public like her husband. Listen to the recordings of Jakie giving her 1964 interview to A.M. Schlesinger. I think Portman nailed it. Jaqueline Kennedy was more enigmatic than her husband. She was nearly hermit like in her personal privacy and has left very few clues about her own state in the days right after her husband's murder.
I guess the best way I can summarize this film is that it is a grainy, glaring glimpse, like the Zapruder film, into the creation of the myth of Camelot. It took about 72 hours to create that myth and one interview to codify it into the ongoing mythos of America.