Review of Jackie (2016) by Matt C — 08 Dec 2016

There's always an obligatory biopic within the thick of awards race that picks up a lot of attention, and 2016's fulfillment of that category is about Jackie Kennedy. It's nice to see a movie that focuses on a woman who, despite being iconic, isn't really seen as much more than a wife and fashion icon.

But how does a woman cope when the light of her life is taken away and she knows that her her legacy is going away with it? Jackie explores these ideas with a calm and sympathetic tone courtesy of Pablo Larraín's direction, Mica Levi's score, and the performances.

It's a cut above most Oscar bait biopics in that it does stuff differently, which I admire, but it still is too slow at times. The movie recounts Jackie Kennedy's (Natalie Portman) coping with her husband's assassination in 1963, seamlessly skipping back and forth seamlessly between her interview with Theodore H.

White (Billy Crudup), the transition of the White House becoming to home for Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson (John Carroll Lynch and Beth Grant), and a lengthy conversation with her priest (John Hurt) regarding her wavering faith.

The ultimate destination of the ending is JFK's burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and the movie deals with Jackie's planning of that as well. Surprisingly, the movie's structure is virtually flawless, the changes in time and content flowing together extremely well and without drawing attention to itself.

Noah Oppenheim's script gives each story and all of the central ideas equal screen time while having all of the ideas subtly tie together in a way that makes the film as a whole feel fully realized.

It also doesn't fall back on title cards at the ending to fill in the blank, which I always find annoying--they simply remind the viewer of what a given film cannot achieve. In terms of the performances, Natalie Portman is very good.

She doesn't really look like Jackie Kennedy, but what she brought to the film make me able to overlook that. She captures the real woman's essence really well as she plays her different sides, putting on different voices when doing White House tours and displaying her true determination and heartbreak when alone.

Even her scenes of ostensible happiness carry an air of melancholy that you can see in her face a bit. She gets Kennedy's voice inflections right, although there were one or two times that it seemed cartoony and took me out of the moment.

Greta Gerwig is also good in her small role as photographer and friend Nancy Tuckerman, which is nice to be able to say since Gerwig has carved out her niche as being so contemporary. As for the filmmaking itself, I would say that it largely compliments the smoothness of its script and how it juggles different settings and moments, and Larraín does a nice job crafting a tone to accentuate the themes that Oppenheim has written.

The film also uses archive footage in a non-distracting way--often times as establishing shots--and alters material shot for the film to look and sound convincingly old, helping inject a sense of reality to the movie.

The movie is also show in a 1.66 : 1 aspect ratio which maintains a retro feel. However, a lot of the tone comes from Mica Levi's score. She did the music for Under the Skin where she pulled off some of the most memorable and effective music for cinema that I can think of, and her work here, mostly using strings and woodwinds, compliments the material well.

Where Jackie occasionally stumbles is in Larraín's direction despite a majority of his work being really good. There's a stretch in the middle that's about 20 minutes where the movie's languid pacing becomes too front-and-center and started to strain my attention.

It never halts in its tracks, but it definitely hits the breaks and makes most of the movie feel slightly uneven as a result. Also, as much as I appreciate the ending, I began to become aware of the duration of the sequence.

Overall, Jackie is an affecting and modestly though-provoking experience that doesn't overcook its material of settle for the melodrama that could have been used at any turn. The film isn't exploitative but instead mature and light on its feet.

Technical craftsmanship and fine acting is demonstrated and although I wouldn't call this one of the best movies of the year, it surely is one of the better ones. 8/10, B+, really good, definitely above average, etc.