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Canberra Today 25°/29° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Jackie’ (MA) *** and a half

AUSTRALIANS today might reasonably wonder why a consortium of film production companies banded together to make a film covering the assassination on November 22, 1963 of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy until the departure from the White House of his widow Jacqueline, a.k.a. Jackie. 

Natalie Portman in ‘Jackie’

The event wasn’t really our problem. On that Saturday morning when a friend bumped into me in Civic and told me, I was shocked but little more. Not so the US establishment, confronted with a calamity that apparently still resonates more than five decades later. 

Chilean director Pablo Larrain has crafted a film combining Jackie’s public and private moments during the three days between the murder and the funeral and thereafter until vacating the White House. Using a mixture of contemporary TV coverage (presumably colourised from original black-and-white footage) and re-enactments, it explores the emotions and private moments of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy, mother of JFK’s four children (of whom one died early and one was stillborn), recorded in an interview with an un-named journalist (Billy Crudup). 

Jackie’s a heavy burden for actress Natalie Portman who delivers a breathy, highly-controlled portrait of a woman kicked brutally where it hurt most and coping with the aftermath alone among the US Government’s ceremonial and political and bureaucratic top people.  Her worst times, in night-time solitude in her rooms in the White House, particularly the bedroom from which, if a line in the film carries any weight, Jack as often as not was absent, must be assessed as conjecture.  But their portrayal is credible.

The film inevitably belongs to Natalie Portman’s tightly controlled performance. How closely it cleaves to verity is a matter for judgement.  Peter Skarsgaard is Bobby Kennedy, who stood by Jackie’s side (sometimes the wrong side). The screenplay provides John Hurt with agreeably thoughtful dialogue as the priest dealing with the unresolvable conflict between the notions of a loving forgiving compassionate god and a cruel god who stands back and lets events just happen. Whether the pair’s conversations actually took place we can only surmise, but Noah Oppenheim’s writing of them raises some interesting religious debating points.

The version showing here appears to be four minutes shorter than that shown in the US.

At Palace Electric and Capitol 6

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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