Jackie Woe

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2017)

This up-close-and-personal movie wasn't the conventional bio-pic my wife and I were expecting to see. Instead it focuses only on the key moments in the married life of Jackie Kennedy, ex-First Lady of the USA taking as its obvious fulcrum the assassination of JFK by her side on November 22nd 1963 in Dallas.
The narrative employs a well-used Hollywood framing device, that of an interviewing reporter writing a post-assassination article on her, which allows the grieving widow to speak out loud her struggles to handle her own grief, break the news to their two young children, fight for her husband's legacy and determination to live on, even after having to leave the White House with her family under such awful circumstances - in one scene we see her in the White House, even before her husband's funeral witnessing Ladybird Johnson unfeelingly picking out new drapes for when she moves in.
Elsewhere, the movie mixes long-range archive footage of the real President and Jackie with jump-cuts to the modern day actors, sometimes shot in sympathetic blurry-TV black and white. Similarly, the non-linear narrative mixes in other pivotal events during her time as the president's wife, most notably the TV special in 1961 where she gives a guided tour of the refurbished White House interiors she personally oversaw, but also her being made to stand next to LBJ in her blood-spattered clothes while he's being sworn in on Airforce One and her determined walk to the Arlington Cemetery from the White House for the funeral. Interestingly, we don't get to see the famous moment when their young son walks up to his slain father's coffin and salutes it.
Less a history lesson than a study in grief, Natalie Portman delivers a tour-de-force performance in the title role. She's in virtually every scene, most often in extensive close-up and convincingly portrays the different emotions Jackie Kennedy must have gone through on the day, from shock, through grief, to determination. Although she interacts most with Robert Kennedy (played by an actor who looks and sounds nothing like the original) while organising the funeral what comes through most is her sense of alone-ness as she drifts zombie-like through the seemingly cavernous White House, playing the record of the contemporary musical "Camelot" in the background as she struggles to keep herself together.
That said, it is a slow film and it can be awkward for the viewer to look in on such private trauma, plus there's a graphically horrific recreation of the moment of her husband's death. I also felt the background music was far too funereal and overbearing in the extreme.
Nevertheless it's worth seeing for Portman's remarkable performance even if ultimately the film itself suffers from its narrowness and over-intensity.