A cut above

Rating: 7/10 (27 February 2017)

Jackie is a film that is right on trend with the latest convention of abandoning cradle-to-the- grave biopics for intimate slice-of-life ones. In this case the titular Jackie is Jacqueline Kennedy and the slice of her life we are treated to are the days following the assassination of her husband, president John F. Kennedy. A woman smart enough to know that image is everything, Jackie manages to gather her wits about her enough to fight through her grief and put into place the structure that will ensure that her husband and her own legend, will live on.
The thing that immediately elevates this movie is Pablo Larraín's direction which is frankly excellent. He gets a great performance out of Natalie Portman as Jackie, who's surreal version of the real Jackie Kennedy's voice is jarring at first, but becomes less so as the film goes on. The shots he gets are really, unnecessarily beautiful, and by that I mean that a lesser director wouldn't see the drama of the moment or wouldn't use camera-work as inventive, but Larraín always finds a way. His choice for the scorer, Mica Levin, is pitch perfect. It's not the usual staid sort of music but something quite sinister and nauseating, music that unsettles but never takes over.
All that said, while the techs were all a cut above the usual biopic the more the film went on, the less I enjoyed it and that was down to the script. It's not terrible by any means, but it goes back and forth and back and forth between a handful of settings/conversations. It's very circular (Jackie wants to do something for the funeral, she faces mild opposition, then whoever opposes her gives in). After awhile this formula begins to sag. Also ironically the fact that Jackie was so successful at keeping her husband's legend alive is what undercuts any tension in the film. We may see Jackie furrow her brow at the thought of her husband being forgotten and worry that she'll end up penniless but we know none of that happened.
Still, it's a beautiful film. And though it tries to scratch the surface to give us a little of the woman behind the legend what it really does is further her legend still by reminding us how beautiful, how clever, how poised and how perfect she seemed.