goes beyond a 'biopic' and into the realm of epic, deeply-felt tragedy

Rating: 10/10 (18 December 2016)

This may not be directed by Darren Aronofsky, only produced - kudos of course goes to Pablo Larrain - but it has the texture and 16mm feel of one of Aronofsky's low budget, hard-edged and cripplingly emotional gems, and Natalie Portman gives every ounce of EVERYTHING she's learned as an actress and puts it all into this performance. This is like Raging Bull great. You hear the term 'tour de force' bandied about by critics looking to wag themselves off, but this is legitimately one of those. It's also an acutely aware film about politics and perception, that even in the face of one of the massive national tragedies in the US history, it's important to remember what to (or not to) say to the press, to conform to an attire, to show or not show off the kids, and to hide the tears or let go when necessary.
But more than that, this is a completely devastating study of hu,man grief and sudden, nerve-shattering and paralyzing loss, and what to do in the face of that when things have to get done and decisions made; in that sense this makes for the "biopic" cousin of this year's Manchester by the Sea, though that's almost doing a disservice to use the 'b' word. The task that Larrain and Aronofsky and Portman have is simple but complex: strip away all of the cultural bark off the tree so we're left with human beings up there on the screen. Again, sounds like it should be obvious, but so many filmmaker pump up their characters full of importance so we can't see what is the real tragedies going on (for a comparison, watch something like 2006's Bobby and then come to this).
It's not that the filmmakers don't point out the importance of Jackie Kennedy Onassis or the Kennedys in general, but actually it's that they do that AND comment on it in a genuinely intelligent way. It's seeing a woman, a mother, a wife, who has seen her husband's brains blasted out right next to her while in a car, having to deal with that which would be one thing (and man what a thing, like the most WTF thing in a lifetime), but then also having to be a figurehead of the WORLD and being in this big cavernous place like the White House (history is often called into question, from Lincoln of course to the presidents killed that people seem to tend to forget like Garfield and McKinley). So Larrain and Oppenheim just make this a person, first and foremost, and Portman shows both Jackie's sharp intelligence, ability to quickly read a situation, with a little shallowness to image, which is not a complaint, it's to her advantage.
So it becomes an intimate, uncomfortable at times (in a good way), deeply felt, sometimes too hard to take, look at what a person, any person, has to do when a loved one is taken away, while there can be little escape from the crushing public image (this often brought into conflict with Bobby Kennedy, a also excellent Peter Sarsgard - he has one of the key scenes questioning what his brother actually *did* that people will remember, ala Lincoln, which, frankly, I sometimes think about myself, that is to say if, I dunno, what if JFK was... overrated perhaps?) This was a shocking and stunning dramatic experience, and the sort of turn from a major star that puts Portman past being a very good, often, terrific, actress and into arguably the major actors of her time. Seeing what she does here is one of the high-points of cinema in a decade - that's how bold this is.