movie review jackie

There are two movies in “Jackie,” Pablo Larraín’s film about Jackie Kennedy ( Natalie Portman ) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.  

Movie number one is a fictionalized biography in which a famous subject sits for a long interview, here with a magazine reporter played by Billy Crudup (unnamed but based on biographer Theodore H. White, who wrote “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” a Life article that ran one week after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination). This one is a movie where an important person contemplates his or her place in history and tries to control how they are perceived. It’s fuzzy and overreaching and has been done better elsewhere. 

The individual scenes in this “historical figure contemplates self” film are competently done and sometimes a good deal more than that, thanks to undertones of empathy and condescension in the dialogue. The reporter is often condescending to the former First Lady. Sometimes he even interrupts her when she’s speaking or tries to put words in her mouth or dismiss her concerns, which shows how not-powerful even a very powerful woman can be when she’s in a room with a man who’s been told since birth that his words and actions are inherently more important than any woman’s. This material in this second film connects to moments in the inevitable flashbacks to Jackie’s heyday in Camelot and right after John F. Kennedy’s murder. We see Jackie, often the lone woman in a room full of men, trying to assert herself and say what she wants and needs, only to be told (by White House staffers, military people, even her RFK) that it’s impossible—because of security or protocol or precedent or simply because the men just mysteriously know better than her—and she should give up.

But the framing device is not ultimately necessary (few are, alas) because, whether the reporter and Jackie are talking about what’s on the record or off the record, and whether what Jackie is saying is objectively true or merely self-serving, we have already seen everything both of them might have had to say illustrated, in a more immediate and often wrenching way, by the flashbacks. 

The flashbacks constitute a second, far superior film, one that has the shock of revelation: we’ve seen this tight, crucial chapter of history re-enacted many times from all sorts of vantage points, but rarely in depth and mainly from the point-of-view of Jackie, who had to go through the gist of what everyone goes through when they lose a mate, only on the world’s largest stage. 

But whenever Larraín and his cast and crew build up a head of dramatic steam in the “past” (which feels far more “present” than the interview stuff), and keep building it up until it starts to feel like the raw material for an unwritten opera or an unmade psychological horror movie, “Jackie” fecklessly yanks us out of that emotional head-space, and returns us to the reporter and Jackie hashing over what it means.  

The second movie in “Jackie” is new and often powerful, and it derives all of its newness and power from specifics. This “Jackie” is the story of a woman who suddenly, violently lost her husband, then had to figure out how to get through the next few days of her life without surrendering her sanity along with whatever power she once had. The mundane nature of this second movie is what makes it feel so eerily accurate. Details such as the specific bloodstains on Jackie’s clothes and the bruise revealed on her shin as she takes her stockings off, the point-of-view shots of Jackie looking at all those men who have concluded they should decide her fate for her, the catch in Jackie’s voice as she tries to tell her children that their father is dead without using the word “death,” the way she goes into a depressive reverie and starts going through her clothes and trying on various dresses while listening to Jack’s favorite album, the original cast recording of “ Camelot “: all of this feels achingly true. But Larraín pushes the “power” of it all too hard (often by ladling on Mica Levi’s lyrical yet too often bombastic score). Even Portman’s accent-driven performance, while ferociously committed, feels too much like a researched, considered, Marilyn Monroe-breathy impersonation, one that has been constructed from the outside in rather than incarnated from within.  Rarely have I seen a more vivid example of artists getting in their own way and tripping themselves up. 

A big part of the problem (for me, anyway) is that Larraín seems to want to make a statement, perhaps one of the ultimate statements, on the transformation of lived experience into myth. This film really doesn’t have the intellectual chops to pull it off, never mind the question of whether that sort of movie is inherently more important and serious and worthy of critical superlatives than the simpler, more emotionally driven one about a widow coming to terms with the loss of her husband and her responsibilities to her children (both the biological ones and the symbolic ones, i.e. the American people).

Jackie as fantasy object upon whom hundreds of millions of less famous women can project their fears, goals and desires; Jackie as wife and mother, trying to keep it together during the worst few days of her life; Jackie as faithful spouse wounded by her handsome husband’s infidelity; even Jackie as First Lady of the United States, looking out over a horrifically altered global landscape and asking what’s next: all these Jackies are present in the hours and days preceding and following the murder. These various self-states are embedded in the way Jackie moves through rooms while the camera follows her, the way she looks at objects and people, and the way she struggles to compose herself and articulate her needs without deferring to whatever man she happens to be speaking with.

Jackie has to stand for herself but also for Jackie the historical figure, the myth, the oversimplification, the blank slate, the retrograde but at the same time revolutionary aspirational figure, and so on. We never feel as powerfully connected to this Jackie as we do to the one who suddenly has to move out of the house she’s been living in for less than three years because her husband’s brains were blown out in a motorcade. Meanwhile, the other characters are allowed to stand for one or two things only, always in relation to Jackie, and as a result, the film’s supporting performances (particularly by Peter Saarsgaard as Robert Kennedy, who doesn’t look or sound much like him, and who cares) feel a lot more fully imagined and realized. Actors always fail when they are asked to incarnate ideas, while they tend to do quite well with specifics like, “You are playing Robert, the brother of the murdered man, and the only person who understands your sister-in-law’s pain.”

The great movie that is “Jackie” keeps fighting to free itself from the clammy clutches of the could-have-been-better, knows-what-best-for-us movie. After a while the struggle becomes indistinguishable from the struggle depicted in the movie itself.

“Jackie” the drama (at times melodrama) knows what it is and what it wants to say. It trusts the audience to figure it all out and speaks to us via intuition, often taking considerable risks and making itself quite vulnerable. It is what would have been dismissed in another era as a “woman’s movie”—i.e. a movie about the emotional experience of a woman—only to be reclaimed much later by historians and critics who struggle to get others to see that this kind of film is just as valid and worthy of scrutiny as the sort of movie where famous people sit for interviews about their legacy and spar about truth and fiction, performance and authenticity. (The character of Jackie is already starting to shape her own myth in the flashback material anyway; it’s all there if you feel like looking for it, and as is the case throughout “Jackie,” it’s done with a lot more imagination than anything in the interview segments.) Ironic that Jackie’s story here is mainly one of a woman trying to imagine her own experience on her own terms, only to be told by various parties, mainly male, that she’s wrong, or that it’s not enough.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• John Hurt as The Priest
• Peter Sarsgaard as Robert Kennedy
• Billy Crudup as The Journalist
• Sunnie Pelant as Caroline Kennedy
• Greta Gerwig as Pamela Turnure
• Beth Grant as Ladybird Johnson
• Max Casella as Jack Valenti
• Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy
• Noah Oppenheim
• Pablo Larraín
• Sebastián Sepúlveda

Cinematographer

• Stéphane Fontaine

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‘Jackie’: Under the Widow’s Weeds, a Myth Marketer

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By Manohla Dargis

• Dec. 1, 2016

On Nov. 25, 1963, three days after becoming the world’s most famous widow, Jacqueline Kennedy slipped on a mourning veil. A diaphanous shroud reaching to her waist, it moved lightly as she walked behind her husband’s coffin in the cortege that traveled from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The veil was transparent enough to reveal her pale face, though not entirely, ensuring that she was at once visible and obscured. “I don’t like to hear people say that I am poised and maintaining a good appearance,” she later said. “I am not a movie actress.”

Intensely affecting and insistently protean, the film “Jackie” is a reminder that for a time she was bigger than any star, bigger than Marilyn or Liz. She was the Widow — an embodiment of grief, symbol of strength, tower of dignity and, crucially, architect of brilliant political theater. Hers was also a spectacularly reproducible image. It’s no wonder that shortly after President John F. Kennedy died, Andy Warhol started on more than 300 portraits of the Widow, juxtaposing photographs of her taken before and after the assassination. She smiles in a few, in others she looks frozen (or is it stoic?); the ones that pop are tight close-ups. They look like frames for an unfinished motion picture.

“Jackie” doesn’t try to complete that impossible, apparently unfinishable movie, the never-ending epic known as “The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and What It Means to History.” Instead, set largely after his death, it explores the intersection of the private and the public while ruminating on the transformation of the past into myth. It also pulls off a nice representational coup because it proves that the problem known as the Movie Wife — you know her, the little lady hovering at the edge of both the frame and story — can be solved with thought and good filmmaking. And as in Warhol’s Jackie portraits, John F. Kennedy is somewhat of a bit player here.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Jackie’

Pablo larraín narrates a sequence from “jackie,” featuring natalie portman..

Jack suaves in now and again, flashing his big teeth (he’s played by an uncanny look-alike, Caspar Phillipson), but as the film’s title announces, it’s all about her. Jackie (Natalie Portman, perfect) first appears at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. It’s soon after Jack’s death and she’s taken refuge in another white house, this one along Nantucket Sound. If its large windows suggest transparency, her tight face and coiled body relay that she has other plans for the unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup), who’s come to write about how she feels and what it means. In some roles, Ms. Portman stiffens up and never seems to get out of her head; in “Jackie” this works as a character trait.

The journalist is a chilly, unsympathetic fictional gloss on the writer Theodore H. White. On Nov. 29, 1963, one week after cradling her dying husband’s head in her lap, Mrs. Kennedy gave an interview to White that he said lasted about four hours. Originally titled “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” White’s article ran in Life magazine and was an exemplar of impressively marketable mythmaking — it inaugurated the Camelot fairy tale. White knew Kennedy, having written “The Making of the President, 1960,” an account of his presidential campaign. But the Widow was another matter entirely, and in his interview notes White scrawled the words “What does a woman think?”

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‘jackie’: film review | venice 2016.

Natalie Portman plays the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy in the stunned aftermath of her husband's assassination in Pablo Larrain's first English-language feature.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American first lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband’s death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote. Powered by an astonishing performance from a never-better Natalie Portman in the title role, this unconventional bio-drama also marks a boldly assured English-language debut for Pablo Larrain , the gifted Chilean director behind such films as No , The Club and Neruda .

That latter work premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and was notable for the subtle nuances and enigmatically oblique approach with which it considered one of Chile’s cultural giants, the politically uncompromising poet Pablo Neruda . The film added another distinctive entry to Larrain’s already impressive body of work exploring the jagged pieces of a complex national identity.

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Molding the layered examination of Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay like a master sculptor, Larrain makes Jackie no less perceptive in its contemplation of America’s loss of innocence than in its under-the-skin study of the bleeding wounds of grief.

A fragmented mosaic that comes together into a portrait of sometimes almost unbearable emotional intensity, it’s also a sharply observed account of how the wheels of the political machine keep turning, even in times of devastating trauma. That aspect should greatly enhance the movie’s resonance in a U.S. election year. Pouncing to acquire rights and then rushing the film into release would be a very smart move for any quality distribution label.

Larrain wastes not a moment before showing us the tangled wreckage of Jackie’s psyche, clearly visible through the tear-stained windows of Portman’s eyes in extreme close-up as she strolls the grounds of the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, a week after John F. Kennedy was murdered. When an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup ) arrives at the house to interview her, there are no staff to usher him in, no filters of any kind. In her quietly adversarial first words to him, she makes it clear that she will be editing the conversation: “In case I don’t say exactly what I mean.”

As a framing device through which events of the preceding week, as well as earlier moments from the Kennedy presidency, resurface, this might have been clunky in less skilled hands. But being privy to Jackie’s determination to honor her husband while taking control of her own legacy makes for riveting drama. And when she intermittently relinquishes her composure to reveal herself to the reporter, those affecting moments then continue to reverberate in beautiful, unsettling ways as she makes it clear they’re off-limits: “Don’t think for one minute I’m going to let you publish that,” she tells him, after a vivid recollection of her feelings in the instant when the bullets struck Jack ( Caspar Phillipson ), alongside her in the car in the Dallas motorcade.

In a high-wire performance that encompasses the careful poise as well as the bone-deep insecurities of its subject, Portman’s voice is her greatest asset. There’s a finishing-school exactitude to her phrasing, coupled with quivering notes like fine bone china that might crack with even the softest impact (at times she sounds uncannily like Jessica Lange). But she also has a cool authority when required, her words and her eyes working together to make it clear she brooks no argument.

One of Oppenheim’s smartest ideas was to use the 1962 network television special, A Tour of the White House With Mrs. John F. Kennedy , to shed light on the public perception of Jackie during JFK’s presidency. Those scenes mix black-and-white recreations of the special with glimpses of the nervous on-camera guide being coaxed and reassured between takes by loyal staffer Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig ).

The aim of the TV special was to let the public in on the extensive redecorating Jackie had overseen at the White House. She raised money privately to buy back furnishings and artworks connected to past presidencies in an effort to bring historical continuity to a residence that doubles as a national monument. That ran contrary to the more standard practice of new occupants swiftly removing all evidence of their predecessors. In line with that thread, Larrain captures moving moments such as Jackie packing up her children’s toys. In one brief shot we also see the hurt that registers on her face as she glimpses Ladybird Johnson (Beth Grant) looking at fabric swatches down a hallway with Jackie’s friend Bill Walton (Richard E. Grant), who had worked closely with her on the redecoration.

That focus on décor also amplifies the public perception of Jackie as a lightweight, or as she puts it in a spiky exchange with her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard ), “some silly little debutante.”

Almost as present throughout as Portman’s Jackie, Sarsgaard gives this next doomed figure of the Kennedy clan robust dimensions, showing his anger, grief and resentment but also his scrambling bid to ensure that the work he and his brother started and were unable to finish does not go uncredited. The look of quiet outrage that flashes across the face of Lyndon B. Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) when Bobby addresses him like he would any underling speaks volumes about the eggshell-like terrain in the White House during that abrupt transition.

The Johnsons both remain in the drama’s peripheral vision field, and yet the observation of the speed with which LBJ stepped into Kennedy’s shoes — insisting on being sworn in on Air Force One even before they got out of Dallas — is merciless. Portman moves as if in a dream in that fascinating scene, still in the blood-spattered pink suit she wore in the motorcade and already being nudged to the sidelines, while Bobby’s haunted eyes seem to foreshadow his own fate.

Much of the film’s densely packed running time concerns the back and forth, the decisions and reversals, of the funeral planning. Here again, the movie is as thoughtful about the rocky navigation of grief as it is about the relentless business of politics.

While riding in a hearse with her husband’s coffin after the body is shipped home, Jackie unnerves both the driver and an attendant by asking what they remember of two other presidents assassinated while in office, James A. Garfield and William McKinley. Unsurprised that the answer is nothing, she becomes fixated on emulating Abraham Lincoln’s elaborate funeral ceremony.

That plan, and Jackie’s intention to march in a procession behind the coffin, creates extreme discomfort in the White House, given the anxieties of the country and the still-unanswered questions about the actions of JFK’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. One terrific scene has a prickly Jackie going up against Johnson’s newly elevated special assistant, Jack Valenti (Max Casella ), later longtime president of the MPAA . This section also sheds light on the shifting role of television at that time as a forum for collective mourning.

Larrain and Oppenheim don’t shy away from the element of self-interest in Jackie’s insistence on such a ceremonial public display, even in the way she involved the couple’s young children. The film obstinately refuses to descend into hagiography. But with profound compassion, it shows its subject to be a complicated, at times self-contradictory woman, struggling to secure her future in tangible terms of economic reality as well as in the more abstract sense of how she wishes to be defined. And nor is JFK rendered a saint, his character flaws suggested in confidences shared by Jackie with a priest ( John Hurt ) whose responses are anything but religious platitudes.

While their roles are limited in scope and screen time, performers like Hurt, Gerwig , Crudup and Grant all register strongly, conveying an affecting range of feeling in their interactions with the central character that underlines Larrain’s strengths as a humanist, as well as a political filmmaker. That’s likewise evident in the heartbreaking scene in which Jackie has to explain to her children about their father’s death.

As good as the cast is, Portman’s incandescent performance is obviously the clincher. Her Jackie is both inscrutable and naked, broken but unquestionably resilient, a mess and yet fiercely dignified. The cogs in her head turn without pause as she assesses each situation and then delivers her response, sometimes with the reflexive spontaneity of a woman reduced to exposed nerve endings and other times with the careful consideration of a political consort who has become a savvy observer. Larrain’s decision to refrain from depicting her reaction in that awful instant in Dallas almost until the end of the movie pays off with wrenching impact.

Jackie is a film very much driven by character and performance, but the visual scheme is entirely in sync with that aim, particularly in cinematographer Stephane Fontaine’s ever-alert use of probing close-ups. The slightly grainy look also is effective in its evocation of the period, elegantly captured in Jean Rabasse’s production design.

Another key element, obviously, is costumes, and Madeleine Fontaine has dressed Portman in impeccable copies of the trademark Oleg Cassini suits that made Jackie such a style icon. One sequence of ricocheting mood swings in which she drinks and smokes while trying on outfit after outfit is mesmerizing. Also a poignant knockout is a scene in which Jackie gazes from a passing car at a department store window filled with mannequins styled in her image. She’s at her most glamorous in glimpses into happier times of White House functions in which Jackie introduced arts, culture and dancing into formerly starchy occasions. Those scenes have their own gentle poignancy in a film whose rhythms are both restless and fluid.

The movie’s gut punch owes part of its exceptional force to Mica Levi’s emotionally charged score, its requiem-style strings heavy with sorrow, sometimes distorted to express a surreal state of warped reality (reminiscent of her fabulous work on Under the Skin ). In one gorgeous passage, military drums come in softly over strings and piano as Jackie considers burial sites at Arlington.

There’s also brilliant use of songs from the Lerner & Loewe musical Camelot , a name steeped in legend that would forever be associated with the Kennedy administration, for better or worse. Larrain’s tremendously moving portrait rescues one of the key players from that shorthand sobriquet, revealing her as a creature of infinite psychological and emotional complexity.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition); also in Toronto festival Production companies: Jackie Productions, Protozoa, LD Entertainment, Fabula , Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard , Greta Gerwig , Billy Crudup , John Hurt, Richard E. Grant, John Carroll Lynch, Beth Grant, Max Casella , Caspar Phillipson Director: Pablo Larrain Screenwriter: Noah Oppenheim Producers: Juan de Dios Larrain , Darren Aronofsky , Mickey Liddell , Scott Franklin, Ari Handel Executive producers: Pete Shilaimon , Jennifer Monroe, Jayne Hong, Wei Han, Lin Qi , Josh Stern Director of photography: Stephane Fontaine Production designer: Jean Rabasse Costume designer: Madeleine Fontaine Music: Mica Levi Editor: Sebastian Sepulveda Casting: Lindsay Graham, Mary Vernieu , Mathilde Snodgrass Sales: CAA , IMR

Not rated, 101 minutes

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy fights through grief and trauma to regain her faith, console her children, and define her husband's hi... Read all Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy fights through grief and trauma to regain her faith, console her children, and define her husband's historic legacy. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy fights through grief and trauma to regain her faith, console her children, and define her husband's historic legacy.

• Pablo Larraín
• Noah Oppenheim
• Natalie Portman
• Peter Sarsgaard
• Greta Gerwig
• 354 User reviews
• 430 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 44 wins & 170 nominations total

Top cast 93

• Jackie Kennedy

• Bobby Kennedy

• Nancy Tuckerman

• The Journalist

• Bill Walton

• John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• Lyndon B Johnson

• Lady Bird Johnson

• Jack Valenti

• Mary Gallagher

• Pam Turnure

• Larry O'Brien

• Kenny O' Donnell

• Dave Powers

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia After Natalie Portman was cast, to Pablo Larraín 's wishes, he asked screenwriter Noah Oppenheim to tear out any pages of the script that didn't contain scenes with Jackie Kennedy, as he wanted this movie to be entirely about her and her experiences. The 120-page script was trimmed to one hundred pages, all containing Jackie.
• Goofs Jackie has the list of funeral attendants read out to her, including "Crown Prince George" of Denmark. Denmark at the time did have a Prince George, but he wasn't Crown Prince. Rather they had a Crown Princess, the later Queen Margrethe. And the only Danish dignitary who attended the funeral was the Prime Minister, Jens Otto Krag.

The Priest : There comes a time in man's search for meaning when he realises that there are no answers. And when you come to the horrible and unavoidable realization, you accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching.

• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Movies of 2016 Already Getting Oscar Buzz (2016)
• Soundtracks Affection No. 3 Composed by Paul Zaza (as Peter Dufferin) Published by Parry Music Courtesy of Latin Music Publishing, Inc.

User reviews 354

• Jan 27, 2017
• How long is Jackie? Powered by Alexa
• December 2, 2016 (United States)
• United States
• Bac Films (France)
• Official site
• Jackie: De Nhat Phu Nhan
• Studios de Paris, La Cité du Cinéma, Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, France
• Fox Searchlight Pictures
• LD Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $9,000,000 (estimated)
• $13,960,394
• Dec 4, 2016
• $29,778,202

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes

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Jackie Reviews

Larraín employs a good deal of dramatic license in order to tell his story in order to paint one of the most unknown of widely known figures of the 20th Century in a complex and fascinating light.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 20, 2024

The equal measures of pain and composure in Portman's understated eyes and expressions speak volumes. She exudes all of the grace and poise one would expect of the icon that has become Jackie Kennedy.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 4, 2023

A chilling reminder that for every act of violence, no matter who is the victim, no matter what their walk of life, acts of brutality leave a lasting wake that reverberates for years.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 12, 2023

Natalie Portman does stunning work...

Full Review | Dec 21, 2022

Surprisingly this isn’t a puff piece aimed at reinforcing Jackie’s venerated cultural image. It doesn’t shy away from her weaknesses or blemishes. At the same time it doesn’t shortchange her strength and fortitude.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Larraín and Portman remember that Jackie was also a human being, and they render her convincingly in a complex portrayal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 5, 2022

Jackie is a heartbreaking portrait of a womans most lonesome moments. With the accompaniment of Levis score and Larrains direction, this film should be in consideration for not only awards but in the conversation of top 10 films of 2016.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

A musical escape from the current maelstrom.

Full Review | Nov 4, 2021

Jackie's Natalie Portman is so incredibly Jackie it's tough to imagine anyone else in the role.

Jackie is a stunning profile of an iconic American woman's personal fortitude at a time of extreme grief. The film is beautifully crafted and Natalie Portman's performance is superb.

Natalie Portman delivers a tremendous performance in a movie that marches to its own beat without ever taking its eye off the ball.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2021

Jackie isn't just a convincing and riveting depiction of a 20th century icon; it's also a heart-rending portrait of a grieving woman trying to regain control when the life she knows is suddenly and cruelly taken away.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 27, 2021

Pablo Larrain and Natalie Portman seem to pull off the impossible in Jackie: to make an incredible internal film about the importance of grandeur.

Full Review | Apr 13, 2021

Jackie is a film about the Kennedy legacy but it's also a part of it. It's as beautifully and evidently staged as the tour the First Lady herself gave on primetime television.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2021

[A] visually-stunning and emotionally-moving film... [but] The people of color in this film were used as background and not one had a speaking role.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

Perfectly timed for interesting Presidential times, Jackie is about as heartbreaking a portrayal of JFK's history and legacy as you could imagine.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 8, 2021

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

Very much a project designed solely to exhibit Natalie Portman's acting abilities.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 5, 2020

The director took a very minimalist approach resulting in a film that feels deeply intimate and personal...

Full Review | Nov 5, 2020

Larrain shot the film in 16mm, an approach that gives the film an intimacy while also reinforcing Larrain's matter-of-fact approach to telling the stories that unfold.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 12, 2020

Film Review: ‘Jackie’

Chilean helmer Pablo Larraín makes an extraordinary English-lingo debut with this daring, many-leveled portrait of history's favorite First Lady.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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“Nothing’s ever mine, not to keep,” the newly widowed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy mordantly observes midway through “ Jackie ,” Pablo Larraín’s relentlessly close-up take on history’s most iconized First Lady. She says it as she looks around the palatial House that tragedy is forcing her to swiftly vacate — and with Ladybird Johnson already perusing fabric samples, to boot — but she’s speaking of far more than just the roof over her head.

Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions. Provocative and entirely unsentimental in the speculative voice given to its subject’s most private thoughts on marriage, faith, and self-image, and galvanized by Natalie Portman ‘s complex, meticulously shaded work in the lead, “Jackie” may alienate viewers expecting a more conventionally sympathetic slab of filmed history. But in his first English-language project, Chilean director Larraín’s status as the most daring and prodigious political filmmaker of his generation remains undimmed.

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Larraín is currently on a creative tear after his inventive literary study “Neruda” wowed Cannes mere months ago; any concerns that he might have gone soft on us by taking on an American prestige project are allayed before a word of dialogue is spoken in “Jackie.” Rather, it’s the first eerie, keening notes of the score by Mica Levi that put our fears to rest, even as everything else is set tinglingly on edge: No director who’d choose Levi, the young British experimental musician who gave “Under the Skin” its haunting siren’s wail, to aurally steer his film has any plans to play it safe. Coolly handsome as the film is, it’s a collation of aesthetic choices that push us persistently and ever-so-subtly into the discomfort zone. Sebastián Sepúlveda edits it into non-sequential shards of memory, jaggedly disarranged in the manner of post-traumatic consciousness, while cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine’s searching close-ups repeatedly step an inch too far into its subject’s already frail personal space.

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But it’s Noah Oppenheim’s remarkable screenplay, not drawn from any credited sources, that takes the most startling liberties with Jackie’s fiercely guarded privacy. Even at her most emotionally riven, she’s portrayed here as a woman in canny control of her identity, switching between different masks for press, public, and associates, and wearing none only when truly alone.

A breathtaking sequence finds Jackie, finally unaccompanied in her wing of the White House, swirling through rooms, necking vodka, popping pills, and listening with rueful irony to Richard Burton’s Broadway recording of “Camelot.” Imagined or not by the filmmakers, it’s a version of Jackie Kennedy she’d never have counted on anyone ever seeing, not least given her painstaking personal dedication to preserving and displaying domestic evidence of the House’s previous inhabitants. “Objects and artifacts survive for far longer than people,” she tells the camera, a nervous smile plastered on her face, in her famous television special, “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy.” “They represent history, identity, and beauty.” “Jackie,” for its part, seeks to represent its subject beyond the cultivated objects and images we associate with her, from that bloodstained, bubblegum-pink suit downwards.

The filming of that televisual tour, nearly two years before the events of Nov. 22, 1963, is one frame by which “Jackie” hangs its cross-hatched impressions of her state of mind in the days following her husband’s death. The other is an arranged interview with Life journo Theodore H. White (credited in the film merely as “The Journalist,” and watchfully played by Billy Crudup), conducted a mere week after the event, during which a composed, tart-tongued Jackie taunts him with fragmentary reveals of her true self, while forcing him into complicity with her disguise. “Don’t think for one second I’m going to let you publish that,” she chides sharply, seconds after giving a teary, sense-led recollection of the shooting itself. Whether that fleeting, wrenching display of grief was a momentary lapse or a teasing, cynical put-on is one of many questions invited by Portman’s intricate performance — so layered in its sense of internal motivation and manipulation that the actress’s fine technical approximation of Kennedy’s froggy tone and phrasing seems the least of its achievements. (It may just trump her Oscar-winning turn in “Black Swan” as the most high-wire feat she’s ever pulled off.)

Between these two interview-led passages, Larraín and Oppenheim (stepping up hugely from previous writing credits on “Allegiant” and “The Maze Runner”) capture their protagonist in significantly less studied form: The immediate aftermath of the assassination throws up one wearying practical dilemma after the next as she attempts to find time and space to mourn. With her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard, excellent) raging at their rudely curtailed political influence, Jackie regards the funeral arrangements as a critical opportunity to assert and cement JFK’s legacy — at a time when her advisors would like to keep the matter as low-key as possible.

Between sparring negotiations over the appropriate course of action, all too few officials pause to ask or even consider how she’s feeling. The film, on the other hand, invites us to listen in on her spontaneous confessions, whether to her friend and aide Nancy Tuckerman (a lovely, understated Greta Gerwig) or a candid Irish Catholic priest (John Hurt) — both in scenes that could derail these otherwise rigorous proceedings with conveniently cathartic sentiment, but wind up adding further emotional and intellectual nuances to the character. After opening up to the priest about the chillier patches of her marriage, he encourages her to take comfort in happier memories. “I can’t — they’re mixed up in all the others,” she replies.

“Jackie’s” intelligently disordered assemblage of facts and feelings is likewise difficult to parse. For away from its piquant, sometimes incendiary observations on celebrity, politics, and the present-tense construction of history, the film is also a stirring, deeply upsetting account of individual grief at any level of scrutiny. The complicated, colliding feelings of anger, confusion, and cold acceptance that come with any personal loss are mapped out here with a sense of fine-tuned chaos, with Levi’s astonishing score somehow playing them all: a lilting, hopeful flute note carried on an alien wash of strings, or a militaristic death march thrumming behind a graceful flutter of piano.

While he feels her pain, Larraín is also loath to leave his subject alone: The most intimate scenes of “Jackie” are often its most gasp-inducing, whether she’s washing blood out of her hair in the shower or telling her children why Daddy’s not coming home. Some viewers will take issue with the boundaries, or lack thereof, in this lucid portrait, but by deftly shuffling through her many reflections and self-reflections, Larraín crucially never lays claim to the “real” Jackie. “When something’s written down, does that make it true?” she asks White, placing the authenticity of his profile further in doubt, before smirking, “They have television now.” In this rich, challenging, endlessly teasing film, on the other hand, the screen provides just as many places to hide.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (competing), Sept. 7, 2016. (Also in Toronto Film Festival — Platform.) Running time: 99 MIN.

• Production: A Wild Bunch presentation of a Protozoa production, in association with LD Entertainment, Why Not Prods., Fabula, Endemol Shine. (International sales: IMR International, Los Angeles.) Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín, Darren Aronofsky, Mickey Liddell, Scott Franklin, Ari Handel. Executive producers: Pete Shilaimon, Jennifer Monroe, Jayne Hong, Wei Han, Lin Qi, Josh Stern.
• Crew: Director: Pablo Larraín. Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim. Camera (color): Stéphane Fontaine. Editor, Sebastián Sepúlveda.
• With: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant, John Carroll Lynch, Beth Grant, Max Casella, Caspar Phillipson.

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Review: Natalie Portman amazes as 'Jackie' in spectacular signature role

Amid the infamy and tragedy of having a famous husband, Jacqueline Kennedy gives her most revealing confession in  Jackie to a priest: “I never wanted fame. I just became a Kennedy.”

The iconic first lady is given emotional complexity and rich understanding through a stirring and ambitious performance by Natalie Portman in director Pablo Larrain’s powerful drama (***½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationwide through January). It's less a biopic than an experimental character study — an effective one — looking at Jackie’s private life in the traumatic days following her husband’s assassination.

Journalist Theodore White (Billy Crudup) reports to Jackie’s Hyannis Port estate a week after JFK is killed for the interview in which she famously links the Kennedy presidency to Arthurian legend and the "one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot." But Jackie is no weak widow: She makes it clear she controls the conversation and even edits his notes, determined to have this be her own version of what happened.

Natalie Portman channeled elegant 'Jackie' at the Hollywood Film Awards

The film shadows Jackie through the 1962 White House TV special she films “to impart a sense of America’s greatness,” the fateful day in Dallas when she tries to keep the top of her spouse's head intact after he's shot, and her efforts to maintain dignity and majesty as she wonders what will happen to their “Camelot” legacy.

Different people see Jackie’s many layers, from social secretary Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig) to her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard). But the man who pulls real truth from Jackie is the elderly Father McSorley (John Hurt), with whom she discusses God, man’s search for meaning and her deepest insecurities.

Larrain intersperses his characters with real news footage and recordings from the era, Mica Levi's haunting string score expertly heightens Jackie’s tumultuous state, and while its nonlinear narrative muddies the plot, Noah Oppenheim’s otherwise tight screenplay offers a variety of interesting confrontations between Jackie and the political players around her.

A for-sure Oscar best actress contender if there is one, Portman gives such a tour-de-force showing that many of her best moments are silent performances. Aboard Air Force One, she weepily wipes blood off her face as Jackie makes herself presentable for the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) — in front of the same mirror where she applied her makeup just hours before. Later, a shellshocked Jackie quietly takes off her bloodstained dress at the White House before finally breaking down in the shower.

Natalie Portman becomes 'Jackie' in unorthodox new biopic

The actress has done her research well, with her breathless vocals resembling Jackie’s own, yet Portman gives her a distinctive spark, too, especially in the way she handles her young children and Bobby. Brandishing an inconsistent Massachusetts accent, Sarsgaard is nevertheless strong as RFK, who laments not being able to do much for the country now. “What did we accomplish?” he asks Jackie. “We’re just the beautiful people.”

The interesting matter of Jackie’s place in the center of a political storm is only touched on, but the film leans more into the personal moments, such as Jackie playing the final song on the Camelot  soundtrack one more time on her bedroom Victrola before leaving the White House for good.

“There won’t be another Camelot,” Jackie tells White. And there may never be another Jackie, thanks to Portman’s signature, spectacular turn.

‘Jackie’ Review: Natalie Portman Turns Offbeat Biopic Into Major Oscar Contender

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Maybe you’re thinking the last thing you want to see is a TV-movie–ish take on the life of Jacqueline Kennedy. Good news. Jackie is not a damn thing like that. There’s hardly a conventional biopic minute in it. Instead, you get a spellbinding look at one of the planet’s most famous women through the prism of what happens right after her husband is assassinated and she cradles his bullet-shattered head in her lap. Let me mention right of the gate that Natalie Portman, in a performance that tops her Oscar-winning role in Black Swan, will floor you with her tour de force as the former First Lady. The iconic look, the breathy voice and the strictly correct posture are suggested but never crassly imitated. Still, if you ever wondered about the steel that Jackie forged through personal tragedy and intense public scrutiny, it’s on display here in an electrifying portrayal that nails every nuance.

Directed by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín ( Neruda, No ), in his first English-language feature, Jackie is a mesmeric conjecture on an intensely reserved woman pushed to the limit by politics, family, grief and her own conflicted sense of self. In the film’s one significant flashback, a TV tour of the White House that Jackie hosted two years before JFK was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, we see a woman passionate about preserving the legacy of art and décor in the Presidential residence but anxiously reluctant to let the camera (or anyone) get too close. From the first unnerving strains of the hypnotic score by Mica Levi ( Under the Skin ), the film thrusts us into a world out of balance, offering mosaic-like glimpses that speak to her state of mind under unbearable pressure.

There is killing, the hospital, the flight out of Dallas when Lyndon Johnson takes the oath, the pink dress and pillbox hat she finally sheds to shower away her husband’s blood but without ridding her of hard, painful memories. It’s then that the First Lady goes into action, comforting her two young children, stalling the Johnsons’ desire to hustle her out of the White House, and organizing a funeral march on the streets of D.C. to rival Abraham Lincoln’s. When LBJ’s special assistant, Jack Valenti (Max Casella), offers resistance, her takedown is satisfyingly lethal. It’s not just vodka, pills and that watchdog social secretary Nancy Tuckerman (a very fine Greta Gerwig) who get her through it, though they help. It’s determining never again be a pawn in someone else’s game.

Jackie’s friend and brother-in-law Robert Kennedy (an outstanding Peter Sarsgaard) worries that his family will just be remembered now as “the beautiful people.” Not if Mrs. Kennedy can help it. In an interview she gives to an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup, alert and vivid), modeled on Theodore H. White, the President’s widow demands editorial control “in case I don’t say exactly what I mean.” Demanding the reporter read her back what he’s writing, Jackie – freely indulging her cigarette habit – coolly announces “I don’t smoke.” As for her words about her last minutes with her husband (Caspar Phillipson), she snaps, “Don’t think for one minute I’m going to let you publish that.”

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In giving us impressions carved out of Jackie’s grief, brush strokes that prize feeling over fact, Larraín – working from a risky, riveting original screenplay by Noah Oppenheim – offers a fuller picture than any standard biographical drama ever could. During private talks with a Catholic priest (John Hurt), the First Lady discusses the intimate problems in her marriage that neither she nor the priest can reconcile. But the Kennedy legacy will endure in her hands. Bet on it. More than once, Jackie references the Broadway musical in which Richard Burton as King Arthur sings of “one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” Did she believe it? No matter. She made sure we all did. This is a woman will not be denied, and neither will this potent cinematic provocation. Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain’s film – one of the year’s best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget.

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 2, 2016
• Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy; Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy; Greta Gerwig as Nancy Tuckerman; Billy Crudup as The Journalist; John Hurt as The Priest; Richard E. Grant as Bill Walton; Caspar Phillipson as John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Home Release Date

• March 7, 2017
• Pablo Larraín

Distributor

• Fox Searchlight Pictures

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

Before Princess Diana, there was Jacqueline Kennedy.

She swept into Washington on clouds of pearls and silk, bringing unparalleled style and grace to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With her young, handsome husband by her side, and her two cute-as-a-button kids in tow, Jackie helped forge a beautiful myth that endured far longer than JFK’s checkered, tragically abbreviated administration—a legend of a picture-perfect White House that, in time, would transcend politics itself.

Even when she left the White House, the spotlight followed. She married again and became Jackie O. She became constant quarry for the paparazzi for the rest of her life, each grainy image plastered in the tabloids for a public eager for more. (One such shot was selected as one of Time’ s 100 most influential photos in history .)

But for all her decades in the public eye, the world best remembers Jackie for the one week she was never out of it—that one terrible week in November.

John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He fell into Jackie’s lap, his blood covering her pink Chanel suit. The president’s funeral procession wound from the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle to Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 25, Jackie leading a black-clad procession on foot. She grieved in front of millions, channeling the country’s own grief and giving it voice, imbuing it with unexpected, healing grace.

Meanwhile, in Washington’s offices, corridors and bedrooms, Jackie fought to preserve her husband’s legacy—to posthumously raise John F. Kennedy from man to myth, to turn him in public perception from a middling president to the caretaker of what Jackie would eventually call Camelot .

“We must get [the funeral] right, Bill,” she tells Bill Walton, one of the couple’s closest D.C. confidants, in the movie Jackie . “Must get this right. It has to be beautiful. … We have to march with Jack. Everyone.”

Positive Elements

It’s hard to quantify the cultural impact Jackie Kennedy had following her husband’s assassination. But the movie does its best to help us feel Jackie’s healing role in this American tragedy. “You were a mother to all of us,” one journalist tells her. “The entire country watched the funeral from beginning to end. Decades from now, people will remember your dignity and honesty.” And so we do.

The film depicts Jackie as both dignified and as painfully honest at times. She relentlessly defends Jack as the “great man” that she believes him to have been. That’s not to say he didn’t have his faults: Jackie knew them well, as we’ll see. But she believes he was a force for good in the country; given more time, she’s convinced he could’ve done genuinely great things.

Jackie chose to focus on the best elements of her husband’s character—perhaps naively, it’s true. But in a way, isn’t that we all hope that our own spouses would do for us? To believe the best of us, even when we don’t always live up to it? “We all live on far after our deaths,” Jackie says. “Presidents will come and go, and everyone will look up to Jack. For guidance. For inspiration.”

Spiritual Elements

Jackie Kennedy, like her husband, is Catholic. But when a reporter asks her if her faith is helping her during her time of grief, she snaps at him. “I prefer to discuss my faith with a priest,” she says, adding dryly, “You’re not a man of the cloth, are you?”

But as the movie goes on, it’s clear that she is talking with a priest.

“I think God is cruel,” Jackie tells him.

“And now you’re getting into trouble,” the priest tells her. “God is love. And love is everywhere.”

“Was God in the bullet that killed Jack?”

“Absolutely.”

“And is He in me, now?”

“Of course He is.”

“Well, that’s a funny game He plays,” Jackie fumes, “Hiding all the time.”

“The fact that we don’t always understand Him isn’t funny at all,” the priest tells her.

It’s one of several such exchanges Jackie and the priest have, each one more probing than the conversation before. In the end, the priest suggests God has chosen Jackie in this time of tragedy so that “the works of God can be revealed in you.” Slowly, he helps bring Jackie to a place of acceptance, if not peace. And, indeed, she tries to bring out the best she can out of an unquestionably horrific situation. The priest acknowledges to her some his own questions about the Almighty, the doubts that lurk in the soul. He talks about how, when faced with an inscrutable universe, we can respond with despair or ignorance or, ideally, the will to face another day. And another. We are given just enough understanding to keep going. “God in His infinite wisdom has made sure that it is just enough for us.”

Jackie, when breaking the news of JFK’s death to their children, tells them that “Daddy had to see your baby brother, Patrick [who died shortly after birth earlier that year], in heaven.” We see a priest conducting Kennedy’s funeral Mass. Later, Jackie and a priest ceremonially inter Patrick’s body and that of a stillborn daughter by Kennedy’s grave.

Jackie also makes a biblical reference to JFK’s alleged infidelities: “Sometimes he’d walk into the desert so he could be tempted by the devil,” she says. “But he would always come back to us, his beloved family.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

The film tells us Jackie knew of Kennedy’s extramarital philandering. “Jack and I hardly ever spent the night together,” she tells the priest. “I seem to remember there being more to our vows.” But, she rationalizes, “Women have endured far worse for far less.”

In the same conversation, Jackie asks the priest how people look at her now. He says they likely look at her with “sadness. Compassion. Desire, maybe,” adding that she is still, after all, a young woman. Elsewhere, we see her in a black camisole, and in the shower. (Nothing critical is shown.)

Violent Content

“I told everyone I can’t remember,” Jackie confesses to her priest about that terrible day in Dallas. “It’s not true. I remember everything.” And with that confession, we see the assassination from Jackie’s point of view, including the horrific moment part of Kennedy’s skull is ripped open by an assassin’s bullet.

The flashback, which is realistically brutal, is shown just once. But Jackie recounts the moment elsewhere. “I know what you want,” she tells a journalist. “You want me to describe the sound the bullet made when it collided with my husband’s skull.” She talks about how she tried to staunch the blood, how Kennedy’s “blood and brains [were] in my lap,” and how she tries “to keep the top of his head down … to keep it all in.” Aboard Air Force One, Jackie wipes the blood off her face as she wails in grief. Blood and gore are splattered on her dress, which she refuses to remove in the immediate aftermath. “Let them see what they’ve done,” she says.

In the shower, Jackie washes blood from her hair, the stained water trickling down her bare back. “So many pieces,” she later tells Bobby Kennedy, Jack’s brother, presumably referring to the President’s skull.

Kennedy’s friends and associates watch as Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed JFK, is assassinated himself. The assassinations of previous presidents—James Garfield, William McKinley and especially Abraham Lincoln—are discussed. Jackie tries to walk into a room where an autopsy is being conducted, but she’s turned away before we, the viewers, see anything. Governmental officials fret about further assassination attempts during the President’s funeral procession. It will be impossible to guarantee everyone’s safety, they say.

[ Spoiler Warning ] To a priest, Jackie confesses that the elaborate procession was not done for Kennedy’s legacy, but for her own secret longing to be assassinated herself. “That night, and every night, I prayed to God, ‘Oh, God, let me be with my husband,'” she tells the priest.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear two f-words and two uses of “g–d–n.” There’s also one additional use of the word “d–n.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Jackie smokes, even as she tells a reporter that she doesn’t. (It’s her way of instructing him not to report her habit.) She’s frequently shown with a cigarette in her mouth, as are other members of Kennedy’s inner circle.

Jackie also seems to have a great many pills at her disposal. She takes one or two on occasion, seemingly to help her sleep. At one juncture, she pours out several vials of pills on a table, perhaps contemplating taking them all.

People drink wine. There’s also a verbal reference to champagne.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Jackie wanders through the White House’s private quarters—places where she and her late husband would talk and play with their children—as the title song from the iconic Broadway musical Camelot plays in the background. The lyrics speak of an idyllic escape, more myth than reality, where “the climate must be perfect all the year.”

But Camelot, of course, was not to last. And in a wistful refrain, we hear the ache of what once was … or what never was but should’ve been:

*Don’t let it be forgot That once there was a spot For one brief shining moment That was known as Camelot * As her interview comes to a close with her journalist confessor, Jackie connects the JFK administration with Camelot for the first time.

“There won’t be another Camelot,” she says. “Not another Camelot.”

Jackie is, yes, an intimate portrayal of Jackie Kennedy, one that follows her through an unimaginable week of pain. But it’s also about a master storyteller, a grieving woman who deftly reshapes the narrative she’s been given and crafts it into legend—a legend so powerful that even now, more than 50 years later, we still talk of Kennedy’s Camelot.

“People have to believe in fairy tales,” Jackie says. “I believe that the characters we read on the page are more real than the people who stand beside us.”

Jackie’ s characters are on the screen, not on the page. And yet the same holds true. Jackie , as all biopics do, dances an intricate waltz with fact and fiction. It offers us a portrait of Jackie Kennedy filled with her own flaws—her sometimes selfish behavior, her snippy responses, her desire to control and redeem the Kennedy narrative—and yet manages to make her feel all the more real and, strangely, all the more admirable.

Jackie’ s R rating is earned for a pair of f-words and a few seconds of unremitting horror. It’s a difficult movie in spots. And certainly historians, as well as fans and critics of Kennedy, might choose to pick at some of the details here.

But on balance, Jackie is a moving, surprisingly spiritual portrait of a woman grieving in the public eye and, in so doing, shaping a nation’s story. And it reminds us all of just how important our stories are.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Movie Review: Jackie (2016)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• 5 responses
• --> December 19, 2016

“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” — Alan Jay Lerner

While the presidency of John F. Kennedy is known for its strong leadership in civil rights and in furthering the cause of peace, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the elegant, graceful widow of the President said that “People like to believe in fairy tales,” and she did her part in propagating the myth of the brief shining moment in American history that came to be known as Camelot. The many contradictions of Mrs. Kennedy are brought to the screen by Chilean director Pablo Larraín (“No”) in his somber, impressionistic portrait of the First Lady known simply as Jackie .

Notably performed by Natalie Portman (“ Knight of Cups ”), Mrs. Kennedy was seen as a tower of strength by a nation in mourning following her husband’s assassination in Dallas in November, 1963, but beneath the steely façade, the film shows a woman in considerable psychological distress who was given to bitterness, drinking, sleepless nights wracked by nightmares, and thoughts of suicide. She herself said that she was “not in any condition to make much sense of anything,” but still had to take care of two young children, plan for the funeral procession, and be ready to move out of the White House.

Jackie takes us into the mind of the First Lady, providing a haunting portrayal of a woman in conflict with herself and the usurpers of her husband’s legacy. Jackie’s guilt feelings about how she could have saved her husband (Caspar Phillipson, “Love and Other Catastrophes”) from the assassin’s bullet, prevent her from feeling like a heroine, yet she is expected to show emotional control and magical powers of inner strength at a time of overwhelming national trauma. Written by Noah Oppenheim (“ Allegiant ”) and photographed by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (“ Captain Fantastic ”), close-ups of her troubled face bring the viewer closer to her feelings of isolation, the mood of disconnect enhanced by the dissonant score of Mica Levi (“ Under the Skin ”).

The film moves back and forth between events, opening with an interview with an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup, “ Spotlight ”) modeled after Theodore White. It is the first time we see Jackie asserting control over what history will record. When asked how she would like her husband to be remembered, she pointedly tells him, “You understand that I will be editing this conversation just in case I don’t say exactly what I mean.” The film also depicts her televised tour of the White House in 1961, her talks with a priest (John Hurt, “ Hercules ”) who offers her some unpriest-like comments, and her participation in planning the state funeral, modeled on the funeral of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

Though conflicts arise because of security concerns, Jackie insists that her two children, Carolyn (Sunnie Pelant, “Bones” TV series) and John John (Aiden and Brody Weinberg), be at her side during the procession to emphasize the scope of her loss. Through it all the myth of the JFK years begins to take shape and still dominates after more than fifty years. Though Jackie is in every frame, also featured in the film are Peter Sarsgaard (“ The Magnificent Seven ”) as Robert Kennedy, Greta Gerwig (“ Maggie’s Plan ”) as Jackie’s personal secretary, and John Carroll Lynch (“ Ted 2 ”) as the new President, Lyndon Johnson, whose interaction with Mrs. Kennedy is notable for its coolness.

Jackie is a compelling film that provides an insight into Jackie Kennedy’s state of mind and events that are not generally well known, yet does not always reach us on an emotional level. Though Portman delivers a strong performance, perfectly recreating the inflections in Jackie’s voice and conveying the elegance of her demeanor, it is often mannered and her authenticity only shows up sporadically. Ultimately, the human being behind the legend remains elusive.

Tagged: assassination , family , government , president , wife

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: Jackie (2016)' have 5 comments

December 19, 2016 @ 1:26 pm Julio

I’m sniffing out Oscar bait. Clearly this movie was made for the Academy.

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December 19, 2016 @ 2:48 pm Kevin Haile

It’s a mundane movie, but Portman puts on a wonderful performance, her best ever.

December 19, 2016 @ 6:10 pm burnt potato

The only thing anyone cares about the Kennedys is the actual assassination of JFK, not how his elitist wife handled the aftermath.

December 19, 2016 @ 8:00 pm Level1

Natalie Portman is one of those actors that is wildly inconsistent in their body of work. She is unequivocally bad in the majority of her movies but surprises with a gem like Black Swan. The ratio is such that I steer away from her movies though –I can’t take the chance because when she is bad she is BAD.

December 26, 2016 @ 11:14 am kathryn j hallett, ph.d

IF YOU LIVED THROUGH THOSE YEARS THEN YOU WILL NOT LIKE IT ONE BIT AS NONE OF THE PRINCIPLE PEOP;LE ARE AT ALL LIKE THE REAL ONES; so it was jarring and cold and not real at all; jackie was a warm woman and not the cold out of person that Portman portrayed; and, the Johnsons were very kind,loving and compassionate of her; and Bobby was very emotional…so,it sucks!!!!!! Portman may be a good actress,but she was given wrong info on Jackie who was strong,regal,loving,and most of all VERY REAL……this was a woman who knew who she was; and, like Michelle Obama did not hesitate to call it like it was; and, oh yes she loved him. Forever.

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In 'Jackie,' Natalie Portman Is Tremendous as a First Lady Thrown into Her Second Act

Tom Gliatto reviews the latest TV and movie releases for PEOPLE Magazine. He also writes many of the magazine's celebrity tributes. 

With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, America’s most iconic First Lady became America’s Greatest Widow. Jacqueline Kennedy was left in a state of shock, anguish and grief, and yet she also seems to have intuited an important truth: The wave of suffering that threatened to overwhelm her (and the nation) counted for little against the longer obliterating tides of time and history.

It was her duty not only to mourn publicly, and properly, but to shore up the legacy of her husband’s never-to-be-completed first term.

Meanwhile — a smaller but sharper problem — she was about to lose her home in the White House to the new president and first lady, Lyndon Baines and Lady Bird Johnson. She had to secure a future for herself and her two children: She was haunted by the specter of poor Mary Todd Lincoln, an earlier Great American Widow remembered chiefly for being money-strapped and mentally ill, a sort of miserable, minor postscript to her husband’s glorious presidency.

How Mrs. Kennedy lay the groundwork for the myth of an American Camelot even as the world seemed on the verge of collapse is the story of the brilliant new film Jackie, which both compresses and races through events with an unsentimental intimacy. Every detail shines with significance.

It’s so bracingly imaginative and intelligent, it practically makes the synapses tingle.

This is true as well of Oscar-winner Natalie Portman’s performance.

The film repeatedly contrasts the Jackie before 1963 — in particular, the impeccably styled woman who hosted the famous White House “open house” TV special in 1962– and the unseen, essentially solitary woman who perhaps realized better than her powerful in-laws how to tend her husband’s flame. (The literally eternal flame in Arlington Cemetery was arguably the least of it.)

Portman’s early Jackie is like a small porcelain doll, shiny-faced while awkwardly showing off the finest bits of furniture in her dollhouse. Her post-Dallas Jackie is closer to a heroine from Greek drama: She’s aware that the entire dynastic house is about to come tumbling down around her, marble columns, porticos, the works, and yet she prevails by sheer force of will, an unexpected reserve of toughness and a sensibility that imbues the political with touches of the poetic.

Portman seems more diminutive than the real Jackie, and she doesn’t project her elusive, almost blank charisma — who ever did, other than Jackie herself? — but she’s the first actress to make you appreciate how powerful Jackie must have been, despite the aura of floating glamour that could be mistaken for passivity. (She also nails the Jackie “voice,” which suggested the work of an elocution coach who had filled her mouth with pebbles and then forgotten to take them all out.)

This is simply wonderful acting.

RELATED VIDEO: Story Behind the Story: Jackie Kennedy and JFK’s Legacy

Summoning her superior knowledge of history — something she’s pointedly proud of in the film — Jackie decides to model the public funeral on the memorably solemn procession that bore the casket of Abraham Lincoln. The idea, which she articulates very clearly, is to make the public associate her husband with that tragic giant and not the lesser likes of the assassinated President James A. Garfield.

Her greatest coup, perhaps, is to invent — not exactly out of whole cloth, but with a degree of creative license — the so-called myth of “Camelot” during a series of interviews with a reporter. Did she and the president, as she recalls here, really love to unwind at the end of the day by listening to the recording of the hit Broadway musical — to Richard Burton, as King Arthur, singing with rich, tender nostalgia about that “one brief shining moment”?

Perhaps. But what director Pablo Larrain gives us is a scene of Jackie listening to the album, alone, drunk, wandering the rooms that she’s soon going to forfeit to the Johnsons. She’s like a caged animal, or maybe an animal that would rather stay caged.

If anything, Jackie suggests, “Camelot” was her song, not her husband’s. She allowed it to become a sort of Kennedy White House theme in an act that was both generous and shrewd, breathing life into an image that would serve the country (and the Kennedys) for decades. She certainly helped further the career of Robert Kennedy, sharply played here by Peter Sarsgaard (only without Bobby’s tousled forelock — the production values are modest, with most of the inner circle looking as if they wandered away from a White House tour line). How many Americans regarded Robert as a way to make the brief shining moment less brief, more shining?

You come away from Jackie wondering if her canny sense of how to play the mass media didn’t put her in the same league as the 1960s’ other reigning enigma, Andy Warhol. (Jackie became one his favorite subjects: She’s featured in more than 300 of his works, many of them based on photos from the assassination.)

This extraordinary movie ends without Jackie having found the true long-term security she needed when she left the White House, but we know the answer to that. It went by the name Aristotle Onassis.

In limited release, R.

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Jackie Enters a First Lady’s Worst Nightmare

The Natalie Portman-starring film follows Jacqueline Kennedy’s efforts to navigate public life in the days after her husband’s assassination.

It’s not unusual for a biopic to present a manicured, zoomed-in version of a true story—compressing a life for audience satisfaction, while boiling off the messier elements. In Jackie , that meta storytelling process is woven into the film’s substance. This is a movie broadly about Jacqueline Kennedy in the wake of her husband’s assassination, but it’s also about her efforts to shape the country’s perception of the event amid her deep trauma, and to leave out the uglier parts. Pablo Larrain’s new film is a wonderful subversion of one of Hollywood’s favorite genres: an illustration of public life that understands its inherent artifice.

“People like to believe in fairytales,” Jackie (Natalie Portman), intones to the journalist Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup). The film is structured around an interview she gave to White eight days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which she was careful to mention her husband’s fondness for the musical Camelot , and firmed up the mythic legacy of his presidency. Jackie is a remarkably composed, artful piece of storytelling about storytelling, as an examination of the gauzy reputation of the Kennedys and the darker myth-making involved. It attempts to reckon with the inner life of an iconic figure while acknowledging just how much she worked to obscure it.

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Larrain, a Chilean director, has some experience making movies about the selling of a story. His Oscar-nominated No (2012), about the 1988 plebiscite that ended Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, was shot like a 1980s news broadcast, on grainy magnetic tape and in a square aspect ratio. It had a time-capsule feel, but it brought the viewer inside the time capsule; it was a recreation that was more than fuzzy footage of protests on a vintage TV. Jackie has its own visual archness. Here, Larrain films his subjects in extreme close-up, often having them look right at the camera lens, as if they’re speaking straight to the viewer.

There’s a voyeurism to much of the film, which follows Jackie in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. For much of the first act, she’s still wearing the iconic pink Chanel suit from that day, covered in his blood. The audience sees her undress, shower, talk to her children, and over the following week, try to arrange a state funeral that conveys appropriate grandeur. They see her close relationship with Robert F. Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), which vacillates between that of bickering siblings and that of an old married couple. She talks to a priest (John Hurt) about her fury with God over what she’s lost, including the children she miscarried. Viewers watch as her pain spills out behind closed doors, while she tries to carefully manage it in front of the cameras. Portman’s performance is, unsurprisingly, perfectly controlled at all times.

Throughout, Larrain frequently cuts back to Jackie’s interview with White, in which she calmly lays out what he can and can’t include in his reporting—reminding him that she’s never smoked a cigarette, for example, as she lights one up in front of him. The gap between how she was and how she wanted the world to see her is made thuddingly obvious, but the story she was promoting was obvious, too—not just her repeated mentions of Camelot (the title song of which, along with Mica Levi’s gorgeous minor-key score, is a recurring motif in the film’s soundtrack), but also in the massive funeral she planned.

Larrain (working from a script by Noah Oppenheim) also pivots back to Jackie’s famous tour of the White House , broadcast live on television in 1962, which helped sell Americans on the major renovations she’d made to the building. There, viewers see Jackie first exercising her muscles for crafting a national narrative. The ostentatiousness of the redecoration was there to lift the whole nation’s spirits, to celebrate America’s historical legacy rather than hide it behind closed doors. Larrain leans into the royal opulence of the Kennedys while poking fun at it from afar.

This is a film about the difference between public and private grief, rendered on the biggest scale possible. But it’s also about the guilt contained therein, as Jackie struggles to reconcile the story she’s built with the very flawed man that she undoubtedly loved. Jackie is an emotionally vivid work, bright and flamboyant at times, but threaded through with compassion. Larrain’s wide-screen cinematography is designed to envelop the viewer in his characters’ mindsets and the stunning environment around them, so it’s be best to see Jackie on a large screen. Above all, what Larrain understands about his subject is that she would want this movie to overwhelm the viewer; he tells her tale with a certain slyness, and with all the majesty she would demand.

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'Jackie' Captures The Brittle Sadness Of A First Lady In Mourning

David Edelstein

A new biopic takes audiences into the White House in the days following JFK's assassination in Dallas. Critic David Edelstein says Jackie conveys both the shyness and slyness of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Common Sense Media Review

Intense, complex film about assassination and aftermath.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Jackie is an intense, deeply moving portrait of First Lady Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). It takes place on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and the days right after. The film delves deeply into the pain of mourning and the aftermath of a national tragedy…

Why Age 15+?

The movie doesn't shy away from the assassination at the heart of its story;

"Damn," "goddamn," "a--hole," and a couple uses of

In the days after the assassination, the First Lady pops pills, smokes, and drin

Allusions to JFK's affairs, but nothing is seen. Jackie's bare back is s

Any Positive Content?

When you're tested, you discover what you're made of. You'll be surp

Jackie is the epitome of grace and fortitude under the worst possible circumstan

Violence & Scariness

The movie doesn't shy away from the assassination at the heart of its story; one scene shows a bullet and the deadly injury it causes to President Kennedy. Also loud arguments under times of strain, conversations about people targeting JFK, and footage of Lee Harvey Oswald's death. In a scene where Jackie showers, her back has blood dripping from it. In another scene, she wipes blood off her face. Bloodstained clothing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Damn," "goddamn," "a--hole," and a couple uses of "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

In the days after the assassination, the First Lady pops pills, smokes, and drinks wine to steady herself and medicate feelings of despair.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Allusions to JFK's affairs, but nothing is seen. Jackie's bare back is seen in a shower scene.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

When you're tested, you discover what you're made of. You'll be surprised at what you're capable of, even in your saddest moments.

Positive Role Models

Jackie is the epitome of grace and fortitude under the worst possible circumstances.

Parents need to know that Jackie is an intense, deeply moving portrait of First Lady Jackie Kennedy ( Natalie Portman ). It takes place on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and the days right after. The film delves deeply into the pain of mourning and the aftermath of a national tragedy. Viewers will see the moment when JFK is shot in the head, as well as the first lady being overwhelmed by a grief that sometimes threatens to overcome her. She's also shown with blood on her clothes and body, and her naked back is seen during a shower scene. She drinks, smokes, and takes pills to dull her agony; swearing isn't frequent but includes "goddamn" and a couple uses of "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 3 parent reviews

A bit inconsistent, but a strong performance by Portman

Wonderful exploration of another side of a well known story, what's the story.

We all know what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, half an hour past noon, when then-President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) was assassinated while riding in a motorcade, his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy ( Natalie Portman ), by his side. But in JACKIE, we learn what happened in the hours and days after the horrific tragedy -- and how Jackie coped with the monumental loss of her husband, with whom she had a complicated marriage. We see first-hand the toll that grief takes, even as Jackie prepares to preserve JFK's legacy while also finding a way to hang onto her true self. Told in a series of flashbacks as Jackie recounts those days to a journalist ( Billy Crudup ) during an often-thorny interview, this moving drama is a portrait of the iconic first lady as we've never seen her before. Peter Sarsgaard and Greta Gerwig co-star.

Is It Any Good?

This intense drama is a must see, not just for history buffs, but for anyone who wants to understand what mourning and the stewardship of an important but complicated legacy is like. Jackie tells a well-known story in a new way by adjusting its focus. Rather than putting the spotlight on the assassination's weight on the country as a whole, it centers on a woman, her children, and her struggle to make sense of a loss that doesn't just feel historic but also deeply personal.

Director Pablo Larrain creates a movie that's both lyrical and arresting, as well as a stunning exploration of grief brought to life by Portman. Her face is a canvas of ever-changing emotions as she struggles with rage, heartache, confusion, fear, and love. And Larrain adds depth to an already complex tale by refracting Jackie's story through the prism of a journalist. At first the interview-with-flashbacks device feels worrisomely artificial, but in the end it helps give voice to larger questions about legacy (questions that's also been explored in the Broadway hit Hamilton ): Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? Who's in charge of your narrative? Jackie isn't a perfect film, but it perfectly captures the messy power of grief and United States' challenges as it cycles from one administration to the next, from periods of prosperity and triumph to struggles and dissent, always cast against the almighty backdrop of history.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what makes Jackie so intense. Is it the subject matter? The actors' performances? How is it different from what you might read in a history book?

How historically accurate do you think the movie is? Why might filmmakers decide to tweak/change some facts? How could you find out more about the actual events and people portrayed in the film?

How can truth and a specific person's version of the truth clash when it comes to history? Are they one and the same? What role do the press and historians play in shaping these versions?

What did you learn about Jacqueline Kennedy from this story? How could you find out more about her?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 2, 2016
• On DVD or streaming : March 7, 2017
• Cast : Natalie Portman , Billy Crudup , Peter Sarsgaard , Greta Gerwig
• Director : Pablo Larrain
• Inclusion Information : Latino directors, Female actors
• Studio : Fox Searchlight
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Great Girl Role Models , History
• Run time : 99 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : brief strong violence and some language
• Last updated : October 13, 2022

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Jackie Is Brutally Intimate and Admirably Brittle

Jackie is an unusually harsh, funereal biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy , as befits a film that covers the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its immediate aftermath. It’s also unusually intimate — all Jackie. It opens in a wintry Hyannis Port not long after JFK’s burial, where Kennedy (Natalie Portman) broods and chain-smokes and submits to an oddly testy interview with an unnamed reporter played by Billy Crudup. (The reporter who actually did the story was Theodore White, for the magazine Life .) As Jackie relays her version of events — often adding, bluntly, that the reporter can’t print what she just said — the film moves back and forth in time. Now she’s conducting the famous 1962 White House tour watched by millions. Now she’s back from Dallas, still wearing the pink Chanel dress splashed with her husband’s blood. Now she’s planning the funeral — and standing up to members of Lyndon Johnson’s staff who think the proposed procession is too dangerous. The theme of Noah Oppenheim’s script is summed up rather tidily in Jackie’s line “I lost track somewhere what was real, what was performance.” But the movie itself, directed by Pablo Larraín ( No, the upcoming Neruda ), doesn’t feel so pointed. It’s hard to discern the differences between Jackie the Performer and Jackie the Person when Portman is doing such an obvious impersonation throughout.

It’s the voice. It sounded wrong to me until I realized that I actually had no idea what Jackie sounded like: Kennedy lives in photos, but there are few extant recordings. It turns out that Portman has perfectly reproduced Jackie’s high-pitched, overdeliberate finishing-school diction in the televised White House tour, which made the First Lady seem at once charming and disturbingly robotic. (How odd to hear a touch of Marilyn Monroe’s breathiness in the real Jackie’s voice.) But when she’s talking to Crudup’s reporter or Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), Portman still sounds studied, unnatural.

Apart from that voice, Portman is so damn smart . She nails Jackie’s irreducible mix of shyness and slyness, each quality reinforcing the other. She also understands what the White House refurbishment meant for Jackie’s sense of self. In the great literary tradition of Americans abroad, Jackie felt a need to prove to European elites that America did too have a history and a serious culture, so there. Her defiant insistence on that funeral procession has the same end: to show the world our dignity.

Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality. Mica Levi’s score is nearly as creepy as the one she did for the avant-garde space-cannibal movie Under the Skin . The film’s other piece of music is double-edged. Jackie tells the reporter that JFK loved the musical Camelot and listened to Richard Burton half-sing the title song every night. She says the administration should be remembered in the same way as King Arthur’s court. A little while later, though, she admits (off the record) that the Camelot comparison is just marketing — but adds that the symbolism is important. The movie ends on a note of tearful, ringing ambivalence.

*This article appears in the November 28, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.

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Jackie Review

20 Jan 2017

100 minutes

Why do we remember Jackie Kennedy? The mention of her name still evokes images of the perfect First Lady, ever camera-ready, a fashion plate, cool and poised by the President’s side. Or the darker vision of a grainy shock of incongruous pink crawling across the back of a limousine as her husband lay dying on the back seat, his skull shot open by Lee Harvey Oswald. We remember her visually, yet what did she do? Pablo Larraín’s insightful biopic draws her as a woman whose purpose was to frame history. Not to create it in any political sense, but to package it for the people, to make it memorable.

Jackie’s timeline cuts across just a small number of days. It begins a few weeks after JFK’s assassination, with Jackie (Portman) inviting

a reporter (Crudup) to her home to interview her. She’ll only allow him to print quotes she approves, insisting after a sobbing account of watching her husband die, “I hope you don’t for one second think I’ll allow you to publish that.” Then we cut back and forth across the days just before her husband’s murder to his grand spectacle of a funeral.

It’s only a brief part of Kennedy’s life but it’s enough to show a complex person. It depicts a woman who is performing at almost all times. She knows what the public wants from her — something like American royalty when her husband is alive; a symbol of the nation’s grief after his death — and she means to give it. She’s not embarrassed by her belief in the importance of image. Jackie’s pet project of restoring the White House interiors is laughed at, but she believes the President’s home should live up to the public’s impression of it. She is ridiculed for making her husband’s funeral as huge a spectacle as Lincoln’s, despite the difference in the two Presidents’ achievements, but she believes the American people deserve to have their grief writ large. As Noah Oppenheim’s perceptive screenplay says, Jackie came to fame in a time when television made modern history a visual record, not a written one, and she knew how to present that. It’s not suggested Jackie’s motivations are entirely for the country. Not a bit. There’s a selfishness to her desire not to have her moment fade to a historical footnote, to have her husband be a Lincoln, not a James Garfield, but it’s a human selfishness. It makes Jackie a person, not an icon.

"It’s only a brief part of Kennedy’s life but it’s enough to show a complex person."

This complicated characterisation asks for a complicated performance and Natalie Portman gives the best of her career. She has Jackie’s precise vowels and stiff , Stepford walk, but this isn’t imitation. She shows the steel and fragility under the surface of a woman who can stand up to the government to demand the funeral she wants, but also stagger around the White House drunkenly trying on all her old gowns in an effort to control things in the only way she knows how, by deciding how they will look. Shot in almost constant close-up, perhaps to convey just how closely Jackie was watched, Larraín doesn’t give Portman a second to relax. You couldn’t avert your eyes if you wanted to.

There’s a moment when Jackie says, “The people on the pages of history books become more real to us than those who stood beside us.” Film does much the same. Whether this is an accurate portrait of the woman or not, Jackie brings its subject to vivid life. You will remember her.

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Jackie review – a symphony of grief at the White House

Natalie Portman is extraordinary as JFK’s widow, but the real star of Pablo Larraín’s kaleidoscopic film is Mica Levi’s score

I n its 6 December 1963 issue, Life magazine published “An Epilogue” for John F Kennedy which enshrined an idea that would come to define his legacy. Citing the Lerner and Loewe musical beloved by her husband, Jackie Kennedy told reporter Theodore H White: “There’ll be great presidents again… but there’ll never be another Camelot.” It was an idea that stuck, effectively immortalising JFK’s all-too-brief tenure in the White House as a lost golden age. “Don’t let it be forgot,” Jackie kept repeating, “that there once was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

A fictionalised version of this encounter provides the framework for the Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s Jackie , a dizzying kaleidoscope of reconstruction, reportage and reinvention that mirrors its heroine’s fragmented state of mind in the days surrounding JFK’s death. At its heart is an extraordinary performance by Natalie Portman as the icon caught in the eye of a violent storm of grief, politics and media management. With her husband’s blood hardly dry on her clothes (scenes of Jackie removing grotesquely stained hosiery have a horrible intimacy), the former first lady must pack her bags, comfort her children and stage-manage a funeral to rival that of Abraham Lincoln.

“This will be your version of what happened,” clarifies Billy Crudup’s unnamed journalist when Portman’s Jackie reminds him that she will be “editing this conversation”. Yet as we slip back and forth in time, from the awful events in Dallas to the aftermath in the White House and the arcane pageantry of JFK’s funeral, Jackie vacillates between candour and control (“Don’t think for one second I’m going to let you publish that”), while Larraín gradually reveals the woman behind the mask.

Having brilliantly melded new and archival footage in the political drama No , and played with resonant biographical fact and fiction in his forthcoming Neruda , Larraín seems perfectly placed to direct Noah Oppenheim’s script, which was variously courted by Steven Spielberg and Darren Aronofsky (the latter now produces). Restaging and interweaving scenes from the 1962 TV documentary A Tour of the White House With Mrs John F Kennedy , Larraín presents Jackie as the first lady of the televisual age, someone who understood the moving image as well as the printed word and became master of both.

In stark contrast to familiar, long-lens news footage, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, whose credits include A Prophet and Rust and Bone , keeps his 16mm cameras painfully close to Portman throughout. From the matching vanity mirror shots of Jackie before and after the assassination, to the tight-focus, handheld views of her dazed face as she stares into an uncertain future, she dominates the 1.66:1 frame, isolated even in company.

With her breathy vowels and strangely stagey expressions, I confess that Portman’s mannered performance seemed at first too arch to be engaging. Only on second viewing did I realise that her Jackie was not alienating but alienated. Scenes of her wandering the cavernous rooms and corridors of the White House (brilliantly recreated by production designer Jean Rabasse) reminded me of the Overlook hotel from The Shining . Whatever else it may be, this is a ghost story; no wonder John Hurt’s world-weary priest becomes the one person to whom Jackie can express her deepest fears. There’s a creepy connection, too, with Larraín’s bitingly sardonic The Club , as the whispering voices with which Jackie contends in Washington seem to echo the cloistered sins of Chile’s Catholic church.

Pulling all these disparate elements together is Under the Skin composer Mica Levi’s magnificent score. From the saddening glissando strings of the opening theme, with its falling invocations of death and discord, Levi provides the unifying emotional glue for Larraín’s deliberately shattered film. There’s a touch of Jonny Greenwood’s deeply unsettling music for There Will Be Blood about the recurrent swooning motif that Levi deploys (not to mention a funereal hint of Handel), while eerie silences echoing between strong but fragile chords poignantly recall Jackie’s isolation. Elsewhere, the drums of war scratch at the edges of plaintive piano pieces, while jazzier sounds evoke the sunny 60s optimism that was shattered in the wake of the Dealey Plaza shooting.

Solid supporting turns from the likes of Peter Sarsgaard and Richard E Grant add background colour, while Greta Gerwig’s social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, lends a much-needed touch of warmth as Arthurian optimism is ominously boxed away to make room for a more abrasive incoming administration. As for Portman, she has earned deserved plaudits and nominations for her title role in a movie that rests heavily upon her shoulders. Yet for me, it is Mica Levi who unites the film’s shattered pieces, becoming the real heroine of this story.

• Mark Kermode's film of the week
• Drama films
• Natalie Portman
• John F Kennedy
• Jackie Onassis

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Review by Brian Eggert January 2, 2017

Natalie Portman plays Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in Jackie , an uncommon biopic that looks at its subject through a narrow frame, rather than a sweeping (and ultimately insufficient) birth-life-death story. Chilean director Pablo Larraín arranges a film that opens with dissonant, falling chords by composer Mica Levi, whose score for Under the Skin remains some of the most memorable music of the last decade. Levi’s grandiose and tragic notes underscore the drama of this picture, as Jackie considers its subject just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The music and thematic dramaturgy of the film announces a fallen empire from Jackie’s perspective, the death of her family’s carefully constructed kingdom and legacy. Fortunately, Larraín and Portman remember that Jackie was also a human being, and they render her convincingly in a complex portrayal.

Jackie served as First Lady during her husband’s brief years as President of the United States of America. During that time, she played a major role in establishing a national identity for the presidency by instilling the notion that her family was the People’s Family. In 1962, she famously invited America into her newly reconstructed and redecorated White House, insisting that, because they were the First Family of the U.S., they should have nothing but the finest art, sculpture, and furniture around them. “I just think that everything in the White House should be the best,” she said. Portman captures Jackie’s elegance and oblivious elitism in all its many complicated facets. Speaking of the surface layer, do yourself a favor and visit YouTube to watch Jackie’s televised White House tour. It may be difficult to appreciate just how well Portman mirrors Jackie’s wooden onscreen mannerism, her breathy manner of speaking, and her slight lisp—quite intentionally making it all seem like a very practiced performance.

In another film, the artificial quality of Portman’s acting may seem transparent, but in Jackie , she’s playing someone with a measured and labored-over public image. In real-life, Jackie was playing many roles as a Kennedy and a President’s wife, but also just a person, complete with her rigid and stately posture offset by her trendsetting personal style. She sought to create a link between royalty and the presidency that seems contrary to American anti-monarchy political ideals, but it was nonetheless something Americans responded to with admiration. In this regard, Jackie understood that linking the present to the past could impart a legacy. The impetus behind her White House decorations and acquisitions linked her family with the Lincolns and Washingtons of the past. “Objects and artifacts survive for far longer than people,” she explained in her tour. “They represent history, identity, and beauty.” Through her manipulation of artifacts and history, Jackie created a lasting association between her husband and the great Presidents before him.

Perhaps this is why, just a week after her husband’s assassination, when the film finds Jackie living on the family’s Hyannis Port, Massachusetts estate, and she has been dejected from the home she built to make way for the Johnsons, her grief has a touch of anger. In the film’s connective tissue, Life magazine journalist Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) interviews her and insists his article will be her version of what happened in Dallas. To be sure, Jackie has complete control over the interview, saying “I don’t smoke” as she takes a drag of her cigarette. But her broken mental state takes the interview in wandering directions, just as the film meanders through Jackie’s memories. “Nothing’s ever mine, not to keep,” she says, embittered and broken, thinking about the quick turnaround from one First Family to the next, but also her husband. And every time she says something the American people may not want to hear, her interviewer already knows that it won’t make the finished article.

Larraín helms his first English-language feature, his third release of 2016 after The Club , about four condemned priests, and also Neruda , another biopic of sorts that was a hit at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. None of these pictures resemble one another, but they each demonstrate a filmmaker in control of his artistry, which has been given over to the subject matter. Producer Darren Aronofsky, who has been developing Jackie for several years with his Black Swan star in mind, hand-selected Larraín and much of the talent involved. Shooting on Super 16 film stock for a frame filled with fuzz and grain, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine pears into the titular subject with penetrating close-ups and frenzied wide lenses, making much of the film look like a 1960s home movie. Editor Sebastián Sepúlveda cuts the scenes into a fragmentary arrangement, adopting the mindset of someone still in shock over the events of the previous week. Nonlinear though the construction may be, Jackie ’s themes remain palpable.

An overarching theme in Jackie involves Richard Burton’s Broadway performance of the musical Camelot , which Jack listened to regularly before bed, Jackie explains. She likens her husband to a king and the Kennedys to a royal family. “There will never be another Camelot,” she tells her interviewer. “Not another Camelot.” Perhaps she’s right. It’s difficult to imagine another American political figure being as beloved as JFK; then again, it’s difficult to imagine a First Lady wielding the power of image and history as thoroughly as Jackie did. Of course, the Kennedys marked the first time a presidential family was on display on televisions in every American home. That novelty was cherished, exalted, consecrated by time, and will never return again. And so, the collapse of her family’s brief realm leaves Jackie paranoid and ruined beneath her meticulous façade. The inherent drama of such lofty heights being toppled inform the grandiose and yet deeply personal trauma of Portman’s excellent performance, and this film overall.

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Cobra Kai Actor Reveals Ralph Macchio Is 'Nervous' About Facing Jackie Chan in Upcoming Karate Kid Film

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Ralph Macchio is slightly nervous about appearing opposite Jackie Chan in the upcoming Karate Kid movie. The reveal comes by way of Cobra Kai actor Jacob Bertrand, who plays Eli "Hawk" Moskowitz in the Netflix series.

" [Macchio] said that Jackie Chan still moves like he's a 20-year-old, and it's really scary to fight with him ," Bertrand told GamesRadar+ . " But you know, he's obviously a master and is so cool to work with. He was just talking about being nervous to fight Jackie Chan , 'cause Jackie Chan is freaking Jackie muh-fricking Chan. But he said the fights went super well and that all his stuff was great, and I’m stoked for the movie ."

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" It was cool texting him as he was, as he was doing the movie, being like, 'All right, dude, what's up? How is it?' And, you know, getting all the updates ," Bertrand continued. " He was saying that the young cast is really, really talented – but that they're not quite as good as I am specifically, that no one really holds a candle to me. These are Ralph Macchio's words, not mine. I'm trying to think [about what he said] verbatim. I think 'I'm a God' is what he said," the actor joked.

The Karate Kid Reboot Was Announced in 2023

The upcoming Karate Kid movie was officially announced in Nov. 2023, with Macchio and Chan starring alongside a brand new titular hero played by Ben Wang . The film, directed by Jonathan Entwistle from a script by Rob Lieber, marks Chan's return to the franchise after his role as a martial arts master in the 2010 remake. Macchio, who reprised his role as Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid spinoff series Cobra Kai , recently offered some insight into his experience working with Chan.

" Jackie Chan is a legend ," Macchio said about the veteran action star . "Just to have that opportunity was exciting. He was wonderful. Lot of heart, lot of soul and caring , I will say that about Jackie. He loves being on set, and it was like his first day every day . I love seeing that at his age and time of his career because I like to try to bring that as well, but a great young cast on that one, and we'll see where it goes," he continued.

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Macchio previously revealed that the movie will have a few subtle ties to Cobra Kai . "It was about always being true to LaRusso --- and still always, throughout Cobra Kai ," the actor said. "And then the new film, it's about being honest and truthful to the character and what would motivate any of his actions. But what I was able to do is find things from [ Cobra Kai ] Season 6 that sort of reference in a way that makes sense if you've watched everything but is not just drawing specifically. It helps motivate all the actions, and hopefully, that thread will be seen by the fans in a good way."

Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 2 premieres on Netflix on Nov. 15, followed by Part 3 in 2025. Karate Kid hits theaters on May 30, 2025.

Source: GamesRadar+

Karate Kid (2024)

Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan to star in new  Karate Kid  movie

Joseph Kahn’s eye-popping Ick is the horror-comedy Hollywood doesn’t realize it so desperately needs

Ick, directed by Joseph Kahn, premiered at TIFF. TIFF

• Directed by Joseph Kahn
• Written by Joseph Kahn, Dan Koontz and Samuel Laskey
• Starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman and Mena Suvari
• Classification N/A; 87 minutes
• Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival; screening at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Tex., this week, and other festivals throughout fall

Critic’s Pick

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick , is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Not that this ambition should be a surprise to anyone who is either following Kahn’s career or those who have been accidentally exposed to it. That first touch of the director’s 2004′s motorcycle flick, Torque , or 2011 neo-slasher Detention can alter your brain chemistry as much as a dunk into toxic chemicals or a radioactive spider bite, to reference just two of the pop-defining hits that feed into the director’s encyclopedia-sized cinematic sensibility.

Equal parts Evil Dead , The Blob , Gremlins , and American Pie , Kahn’s latest film smooshes together incendiary satire with sticky gore, as it charts the Born in the U.S.A. dreams of Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), a high-school football star whose life descends into small-town mediocrity after enduring an on-field injury. After zipping through Hank’s back story in a series of frenetic flashback sequences, each new instance of his poor choices and bad luck sound-tracked by a blistering early-aughts pop-punk anthem, the film settles slightly down to focus on our hero’s current circumstances.

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Now a science teacher at his alma mater, Hank becomes obsessed with studying the passive alien slime that has been slowly covering the United States for the past two decades, including his anywhere town of Eastbrook. Of course, the ick of the title isn’t the kind of threat to stay dormant forever, and soon enough, Hank finds himself defending Eastbrook from carnage, with assistance (and sometimes hindrance) from his star student, Grace (Malina Pauli Weissman), and her mother/Hank’s high-school ex, Staci (Mena Suvari).

Once the set-up is complete, Kahn moves the story along with the kind of electric momentum that has seared his films and music videos – including work for Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga – so easily onto your brain. Every shot feels a few milliseconds shorter than audiences have come to expect, the director fully enlisted in the battle raging for our ever-diminishing attention spans.

And once the ick goes fully lethal – ripping apart teenage bodies without purpose or discrimination – the visceral delirium barely rests to catch its own breath. Compared with the rash of “elevated horror” films dominating today’s landscape, each slowed and slicked to assumed perfection, Ick moves like a runaway trolley, ignoring any contemporary dilemmas tied along its tracks.

But as much as Kahn delights in toggling the line between engaging and overwhelming the eye, Ick is a film rich in themes, even if its ideas are layered in between gobs of goo. After the residents of Eastbrook come face to face with the horror that has thrived for years quite literally under their noses, reactions range from casual ignorance to dangerously familiar hostility. What right does the government have, any way, to ensure that my kids aren’t devoured by a malevolent alien force? I didn’t catch sight of a “Make America Gory Again” hat, but perhaps Kahn spliced one in so quickly that it’ll take a few more viewings to catch.

Ick ’s politics aren’t single-mindedly didactic, either, with Kahn leading several sacred cows to the killing floor over the course of the film. Grace’s boyfriend is a cheating jerk of the highest Stiffler-like order, but he’s also a stealthily faux “ally” to the under-represented and historically ostracized, weaponizing his so-called wokeness to his own prom-king advantage. It’s no accident, also, that Ick might be the first movie in history to let loose the words, “J.K. Rowling sucks” – no matter whether the movie believes that sentiment or not.

But Kahn’s real secret weapon is casting. Routh not only pulls off a note-perfect riff on the square-jawed heroism of Evil Dead ’s Bruce Campbell, but mines his own Hollywood trajectory – from Superman to, well, here – to inject Hank’s journey with deep reservoirs of regret. And there is no one other than Suvari – whose roles in American Pie and American Beauty represented an apotheosis of adolescent dream material – who can rightfully play the cheerleader who got away.

While Kahn’s film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, doesn’t yet have distribution – a crime worse than any perpetrated by the ick itself – I have a good feeling that it will find a home soon. It is a film that begs to be unleashed.

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