First Lady becomes First Widow

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2017)

The assassination of JFK is one of those mythical events in American history on which an infinite number of movies can be based. 'Jackie' is at least the fourth, after JFK, Love Field and Parkland. The viewpoint is original: not so much the assassination itself is the subject, but the way Jacqueline Kennedy handles it.
Pablo Larrain shows many sides of the First Lady, most of which are not very flattering. The movie jumps between different time frames: an interview with a newspaper reporter, a conversation with the family priest, the recording of a televised tour of the White House, and the period between the actual assassination and the funeral.
In all of the viewpoints, Jackie Kennedy is shown mostly as a very vain, self-centred and outright unsympathetic woman. There's no doubt her grief is genuine, but you wonder if Jackie cares more about the loss of her husband or about the loss of her position as First Lady. Immediately after the events, she seems to prepare for her next image: that of the First Widow.
The film shows how she starts organizing the funeral and insists on making it a huge show. Her demands drive the presidential staff crazy, she doesn't hesitate for one moment to put her children on display and her sadness doesn't prevent her to make one cynical remark after another.
Sometimes you wonder how historically accurate everything is. Did Jackie really ask the ambulance driver who takes her and her dead husband to the hospital if he knows who James Garfield and William McKinley are? Are those names of murdered presidents really what bothered her, minutes after her husband was shot in the head?
The film contains some very strong and chilling scenes. The close-up of a tearful Jackie slowly wiping her husband's blood from her face in front of a mirror is extremely intense. So is the scene in which she slowly removes her bloody clothes in one of the posh rooms of the White House. And the scene in which she, days after the tragic events, had to put on a happy face for her son's birthday is also very strong.
One thing that makes this film really stand out is Natalie Portman's acting. Initially I thought she had overdone the accent, but after viewing the historical footage of the televised White House tour on YouTube, I know it's spot on.