Jackie (2016)

Jackie 

Director : Pablo Larrain

Writter: Noah Oppenheim

Stars : Natalie Portman,Peter Sarsgaard,Greta Gerwig,

Story line 
JACKIE is a portrait of one of the most important and tragic moments in American history, seen through the eyes of the iconic First Lady, then Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman). JACKIE places us in her world during the days immediately following her husband's assassination. Known for her extraordinary dignity and poise, here we see a portrait of the First Lady as she fights to establish her husband's legacy and the world of "Camelot" that she created and loved so well
Imdb link here

Jackie Places the First Lady Under a Microscope

Chilean director Pablo Larraín (The Club, No) is a passionately political filmmaker, unafraid to tangle with explosive issues in his home country and unsparing in his placement of the occasional grisly detail. In Jackie, he turns his sights on America, and on the experience of one very public figure who shrank from the public’s gaze. Natalie Portman plays Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that obviously shook the world. But what did it mean for her?

Larraín and Portman pose some possible answers. As the widowed First Lady recounts the events of Nov. 22 and their aftermath to a journalist (a Theodore White stand-in played by Billy Crudup), Larraín dramatizes them: she explains her desire to give her husband the most beautiful and respectful funeral possible, using that of Abraham Lincoln as a model. She also relays graphic details of how her husband died. Larraín depicts the moment, at first discreetly and then graphically.

But where’s the line between a sensitive work of imagination and an invasion of real-life grief in the service of arty film making? There’s a lot of clever technique in Jackie, like its canny, razor-precise editing. But there’s also something arch and distant about the picture. Portman tries to portray this most enigmatic figure as frosty, inscrutable and vulnerable, but the performance comes off as calculating and mannered. In one scene, the dazed, grief-stricken widow drifts through the private living quarters she had shared with her husband, slipping in and out of stately gowns and cocktail dresses, blurring her feelings with cigarettes and alcohol while Richard Burton sings “Camelot” in the background. It’s a beautifully constructed sequence, but it throws off a voyeuristic sheen. The real-life Jackie guarded her privacy graciously but fiercely. Jackie strips her down and puts her on display. In its cool appraisal, it renders her more specimen than human being.

Read full review at Time

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Movie rating ★★★★

 Natalie Portman captures emotional intimacy of ‘Jackie

Rule No. 1 for sensible filmgoers: Figure out what the movie you’re watching is trying to do, rather than what you expect or want it to do, then proceed accordingly. This is especially important in the case of “Jackie,” because most of us assume we know what a movie that stars Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy and comes out in Oscar season will look like: Camelot, panoply, history, throngs. Most of us will be wrong.

Directed from Noah Oppenheim’s script by the young Chilean tornado Pablo Larraín — his other 2016 biopic, “Neruda,” is Chile’s foreign-language Oscar entry — “Jackie” is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered.

Set in the days and weeks following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, “Jackie” is a character piece in which an essentially powerless supporting player suddenly becomes the architect of her own destiny — indeed, becomes responsible for how the man who married her, showcased her, and cheated on her will be remembered in the popular imagination. Shot by Stephane Fontaine, it’s a film told in close-up — many, many close-ups — with hovering camera lenses and a keening score by Mica Levi that becomes a protean character in its own right.

For the first 15 minutes or so, though, you’re pushed back on your heels. Portman’s Jackie Kennedy is so breathy, so mannered, that the film seems headed for a train wreck before it’s even left the station. Surely the real Jackie didn’t speak like this? A trip to YouTube, where the 1962 White House tour broadcast re-created in the film can be found in its entirety, reminds us that she did. What becomes apparent as “Jackie” rolls on is how much of that public persona was performance — to cover nerves, to live up to the historic role — and how tragedy both liberated the performer and forced her to double down.

There’s a framing device, set in Hyannis, in which a nameless Life magazine journalist — Theodore H. White, as played by Billy Crudup — gently interviews the ex-first lady and she gently but insistently nudges him toward the glib metaphor of Camelot. (The musical had opened on Broadway less than a month after JFK’s election in 1960.) Mostly, though, “Jackie” is set in the immediate aftermath of trauma.

We see the blood on the dress, the skull fragment in her hand. Images we know from photos or grainy news footage acquire the weird weight of drama: the scene aboard Air Force One as Lyndon Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) is sworn in, his wife (Beth Grant) and Jackie at his side, the dead president’s body in the next compartment.

At the White House, a power struggle discreetly commences as Johnson and his minions edge the widow toward the door. LBJ’s chief aide, Jack Valenti (Max Casella), has the face of a third-rate mortician (and a future as the creator of the movie ratings system that will grace “Jackie” with an R for brief strong violence and some language).

Jackie’s own aide, Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), is a sympathetic sisterly figure; Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) is protective, racked with guilt, and cradling his own agenda. The children (Sunnie Pelant as Caroline and twins Aiden and Brody Weinberg as John Jr.) are children. No one wants Jackie to walk with them alongside the funeral cortege in public. Everyone thinks she’s used to doing what she’s told.

All these fine actors are underused in “Jackie” because their characters are secondary to the immediacy of the heroine’s grief and confusion — her coming to grips with her predicament. What’s Jackie’s new role? Is it anything like who she actually is? The movie drifts along the edge of panic, which is a place Natalie Portman has always seemed comfortable (the narcotized fantasy play of her “Star Wars” movies notwithstanding). I started the film convinced the performance was a stunt and an awkward one at that; by the end, I found myself terribly moved by the empathy and complexity of Portman’s portrayal and by the bravery of her creative imagination.

“Jackie” is probably not a movie for mass audiences — too unsentimental, too interior, lacking in the touch of the circus. It may be too strange for even the Academy, although Levi’s thrilling score, built from the deep, woody bass section of the strings where cellist Pablo Casals lived, deserves some kind of medal. When Larraín brings on John Hurt as a wizened and wily old priest, dispensing heartfelt but not exactly doctrinal spiritual advice to the widow, you can feel the movie lifting off into some ecstatic parallel universe of its own.

Of course it’s all fiction; of course it’s a fantasy. So was the public paper doll that obscured the genuine woman beneath, whoever she was. Jackie Kennedy, by which I mean the cultural artifact we called “Jackie Kennedy,” was always theater. “Jackie” the movie, by contrast, is about the sorrow, resentment, and fear — and vanity, and rage, and, finally, strength — of an ingénue thrust violently alone onto center stage.

Read full review at Boston globe

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Under the Widow’s Weeds, a Myth Marketer

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.

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?”

“Jackie” takes another pass at that question, but with a shift in emphasis, asking instead: “What does this specific human being think?” The Chilean director Pablo Larraín, making his first English-language feature, takes this query and his title subject seriously but without deadening self-importance. The film has the requisite surface fidelity, the meticulous re-creations, period trim and historical figures sympathetically played by the likes of Peter Sarsgaard and a bouffanted Greta Gerwig. But it also has moments of lightness and strangeness, as well as kinks and sour notes, which strengthen the sense that these are people, not figurines in a dutiful, paint-by-numbers biopic.

The White interview thrusts the story into the past, teleporting Jackie, for instance, onto Air Force One, where — with her back to the camera — she primps in a mirror while practicing an apparent speech in Spanish for the imminent Dallas trip. Dressed in her pink Chanel suit, she puts on her pillbox hat, as if ready for her entrance. The suit’s bright color gives the film a visual jolt, much like the deep-red roses that someone places in Jackie’s arms after she and Jack deplane. Some of the most famous photos from that day, like those of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One, are in black and white, so it’s easy to miss that the smudges that later appeared on the pink suit were splatters of blood.

Written by Noah Oppenheim, the film has a bookend structure, with opening scenes echoing those at the conclusion. It’s a familiar design, one that briefly gives the film a “once upon a time” flavor, as Jackie tells her story, moving, often briskly, among the present, near past and distant past. Fragmented narratives with hopscotching time aren’t uncommon, even if they often come across as efforts to jazz up a dull story. In this case, these shifts help blur time — the past remains horrifyingly present — and underline the magnitude of her trauma. And while some of the flashbacks are suitably glamorous, others expose the raw horror that Jackie’s veil conceals and announces.

The film peers behind that veil to find a woman who’s more complex than history can make her seem. To that end there are several Jackies roving in the movie, among them the anxious, breathy hostess who wafts through the White House, explaining her renovations to a CBS crew for a 1962 tour. There’s the dancing Jackie, the clapping Jackie. Jackie the mother, Jackie the wife. There’s also the steely Jackie, who insists on an elaborate public funeral procession with bagpipes and visiting witnesses to her bereavement. To help put across these Jackies, Mr. Larraín reconstructs some historical images of Mrs. Kennedy and at times blends in these re-creations with original footage.

The re-creations in “Jackie” invite you to compare the originals with the reproductions, scrutiny that in turn emphasizes just how much of a performance each really is. Repeatedly, Mr. Larraín shows Jackie looking in mirrors and through windows, a strategy that doubles her image and underscores her multiple roles. Some of the burdens of such performances are less explored than inferred, as when she startlingly compares Jack to Jesus with a reference to temptations and the desert. In this telling, at least, her restoration of the White House becomes a preview of the gut renovation of the Kennedy legacy that she initiates, a redesign that also positions Jack as a latter-day Lincoln.

Other than some fanciful nonsense that dribbles out of Bobby Kennedy (Mr. Sarsgaard), the film mostly avoids presidential politics and policies, as well as the grim scandals, sex parties and popped pills. Instead, it explores the fantasy that becomes that scandalous house’s own double: Camelot, as Mrs. Kennedy christened it. The idea of the Kennedy years as Camelot became an enduring trope and, for some, a maddening lie. In a 2011 essay in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens took a whack at Jacqueline Kennedy, arguing that her “winsome innocence,” as he put it, was “a soft cover for a specific sort of knowingness and calculation.” This knowingness seemed to repulse him; it galvanizes “Jackie.”

The film takes Jackie’s cunning and dissimulations as much for granted as it does her elegance and love of couture. Put differently, it takes her personhood for granted, which may be why Mr. Larraín shows all the snot, tears and blood, all the desperate bodily mess. In “Jackie,” Kennedy’s body — the object of obsessive inquiries — is replaced by hers in a kind of symbolic transfiguration as she assumes the role of his dignified representative, the guardian of a shining legacy. The assassination was a national and personal tragedy, one which she answered with a myth which was an act of radical will and sovereignty. She married John F. Kennedy; she also helped invent him.

Read full review at New york times

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Movie rating ★★★★★

Natalie Portman astonishes in remarkably intimate portrait

Pablo Larraín’s portrait of the first lady before and following John F Kennedy’s assassination doesn’t play to the standard tropes of Hollywood biopics. It’s a singular vision

Jackie, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s English-language debut starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, boasts a commonly used framing device – but there’s nothing familiar about Larraín and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s treatment of their iconic subject.

Structured around Theodore H White’s Life magazine interview at Hyannis Port a mere week after the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, Jackie unfurls in a mosaic-like manner, tracking only the brief but definitive period in her life while still managing to cover a lot of ground. The narrative doesn’t just move back and forth between the tragic day in Dallas, the arranging of the president’s funeral, her time spent accompanying her husband’s coffin to Arlington cemetery, and her earlier time in the White House – it often swirls, whirling the series of events together into a dizzying whole.

Larraín has never told a true story in a predictable manner (he took a metafictional approach in his portrait of celebrated poet and politician Pablo Neruda in his last film, Neruda), and he doesn’t here. Coupled with a bold narrative approach, that’s bound to turn off some viewers, Larraín drowns his film with a cacophonous score by Under the Skin composer Mica Levi that burrows uncomfortably deep. He also shoots in grainy 16mm, often in severe closeup, lending Jackie an uncommonly raw quality for a biopic of its nature.

Portman is altogether astonishing in the role. Apart from sharing a wide smile, she doesn’t much resemble Kennedy. She is however gifted with an overpowering beauty – much like the real-life figure – that Larraín makes great use of in key scenes to illustrate the galvanising effect Kennedy had on those around her. Most importantly, Portman thoroughly nails Kennedy’s breathy and docile-sounding voice, without letting the affectations get the better of her. Her accent doesn’t define her portrayal – it infuses it with a tenacious vitality

As written by Oppenheim, Kennedy is a wonderfully complex character, bursting at the seams with contradictions. During her long interview with White, she’s portrayed as both testy (“Are you giving me professional advice?,” she challenges after he makes the mistake of suggesting she’d do well in broadcast journalism), and extremely vulnerable (describing her husband’s murder shatters her guard). In flashbacks to happier days spent getting acquainted with her duties at the White House, Kennedy is timid and inquisitive.

What grounds Portman’s take, however, is a key sequence immediately following the assassination that sees Kennedy shower her husband’s blood off her hair, struggle to rip off her crimson-stained pantyhose, and then finally, lie in bed alone. The intimate access is wrenching in its matter-of-factness.

Despite Jackie’s autumn festival placement (it world premiered at Venice, and is currently screening in Toronto), typically reserved for Oscar hopefuls, Larraín’s character study doesn’t play into that narrative. It’s a singular vision from an uncompromising director that happens to be about one of the most famous women in American history. Jackie is not Oscar bait – it’s great cinema  

Read full review at The Guardian

☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸☸

Movie rating ★★★★

In ‘Jackie,’ Natalie Portman plays an iconic first lady as masterful myth-maker

 From the dissonant minor chords of its opening music, “Jackie” puts the audience on notice that this isn’t going to be a comfort-blanket biopic. Those violins sound less like musical notes than icy shards, and when the picture comes up, we see the film’s title character, Jacqueline Kennedy, not serenely swathed in Paris couture or in a prim Chanel suit, but in an unnervingly tight close-up, red-eyed, sobbing and on the verge of coming undone.

Rest assured, the iconic version of the 20th century’s most revered and remembered first lady is on display in “Jackie.” But in the hands of filmmaker Pablo Larraín and actress Natalie Portman, even the most familiar images feel strangely refracted, simultaneously of a piece with the woman we came to know as Jackie Kennedy and distorted beyond recognition. “I’ve lost track of what was real and what was performance,” Portman’s Jackie says, articulating the cardinal themes of a film that seeks to pay homage to a woman enduring unspeakable grief, and to interrogate the Camelot myth she so skillfully crafted in the wake of that loss.

 “Jackie,” which Larraín directed from a script by Noah Oppenheim, begins a week after John F. Kennedy’s assassination Nov. 22, 1963, when Jacqueline conducted an interview for Life magazine with Theodore White. In the film, the unnamed journalist, played by Billy Crudup, is a composite of White, historian Arthur Schlesinger and author William Manchester, as well as a group of skeptics who believed that the pageantry of Kennedy’s funeral was out of line with his actual accomplishments. The interview — conducted at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port — forms the spine of “Jackie,” which toggles back and forth between the taping of the “Tour of the White House” special the first lady filmed in 1961, the events in Dallas and the days immediately following the assassination.

What emerges is an unsettling, almost hallucinogenic study in contradiction: Portman’s Jackie is soft yet steely, vulnerable yet shrewd, propelled by a fierce, unyielding rage, yet superbly controlled and controlling. She exerts complete editorial control over what will and will not appear in the article. After recalling the assassination in graphic, emotionally wrenching detail, she turns icy: “Don’t think for a second that I’m going to let you publish that.” And those cigarettes she lights compulsively throughout the afternoon? “I don’t smoke,” she says.

The line gets a rare laugh in a rigorously beautiful film that’s been exquisitely designed and filmed to merge artifice with actual footage of the “Tour of the White House” special and JFK’s funeral. Portman, her hair swooped into Jacqueline’s signature bouffant, her posture perfectly capturing her character’s dancer-like poise, delivers a performance for the ages, never flinching as the camera moves in for close-ups that begin to feel intrusive and unseemly. When her Jackie finally gives into grief — which includes the loss of an infant son just a few months earlier — the viewer might question whether Oppenheim and Larraín are being unforgivably opportunistic as they allow viewers to wallow in what is clearly a thoroughly researched but still speculative portrait of one of history’s most private people.

At one point, Portman staggers through the White House, sipping vodka and popping sedatives, smoking and trying on gowns as Richard Burton trills the title song from “Camelot.” Weird and impressionistic, it’s the dark mirror-image of the White House tour, as a woman bids goodbye to a home that was never really hers in the first place. Later, Larraín puts us in the car with her in Dallas, so we can experience the trauma that’s been kept at a safe distance in the Zapruder film.

Far from gratuitous, these scenes pulse with emotion, as Portman cycles through every beat with ferocious commitment and brio. It might take a few moments to adjust to the distinctive New England cadence, dabbed with shy, Marilyn-esque mannerisms, but she finally creates a character who fights her in-laws and “Lyndon’s people” for an open-air funeral procession, not out of vulgar self-regard, but because she understands in her bones the importance of ritual and material culture, stagecraft and narrative that today would be called “optics.”

Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, “Jackie” would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent. On its surface, “Jackie” is a portrait of masterful style and story­telling, as one of the world’s most admired first ladies determinedly solidifies her dead husband’s legacy. But at its core, it’s about a young, strong, unimaginably frightened woman seizing the opportunity to live a life she can finally call her own.

Read full review at Washington post

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Movie rating ★★★☆

 In 'Jackie,' a fractured Kennedy fable

History, lately run amok, is ordered with such tidy, forceful finesse by Natalie Portman's Jacqueline Kennedy in in the piercing "Jackie." Summoning a journalist to Hyannis Port in 1963, not long after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, she coolly sets the record for her late husband's legacy, coining "Camelot" and shaping the mythology. Some details that don't fit the narrative she simply crosses out. "I don't smoke," she tells the Life magazine reporter (Billy Crudup), with a cigarette dangling between her fingers.

Pablo Larrain's "Jackie," a work of probing intimacy and shattered stereotype, is an electrifyingly fractured portrait of the former First Lady. Gone is the image of the wan, serene Jackie. Here, instead, is a savvy public-relations operator, a steely widow in grief and a woman redefining herself amid tragedy. "I'm his wi--" she begins saying after Dallas. "Whatever I am now."

The more complicated view of the mysterious Kennedy is inspired partly by the revelatory private interviews conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and released in 2011. She was not purely her pillbox-wearing public image, not merely a totem of grace, the candid tapes revealed.

Throughout "Jackie," we feel her discomfort at playing a starring role in an American fairy tale turned nightmare. The disharmony, sounded by Mica Levi's knotted, gloomy score, is always there between persona and person. "We're the beautiful people, right?" she sarcastically quips. Exiting Air Force One, she deadpans to her husband (Caspar Phillipson), "I love crowds." In Larrain's hands, Kennedy's pained public performance is a kind of sacrifice. "Jackie" is at once a deconstruction of the Jackie Kennedy fable and a dramatization of its making.

Penned by Noah Oppenheim ("The Maze Runner"), "Jackie" evades the traditional biopic format like a disease. It's organized around the Hyannis Port interview with flashbacks to events large and small before the assassination, during it and after. Many of the scenes, quiet and empty, are shot less like flashbacks than like Kennedy's own splintered, haunted memories.

Some, like her televised White House tour (recreated with black-and-white precision), are familiar. Others are strikingly surreal. Kennedy silently marching through a vacant White House, her pink suit bloodied from the shooting, is an unshakable image that feels straight out of Kubrick.

And then there's Kennedy stomping through rainy Arlington, her heels digging into the wet ground. Seeking a spot for what will be the Eternal Flame, she is, through force of will, staking a plot in history for her husband. "Have you read what they've been writing?" she first greets the reporter. "It's no way to be remembered."

Portman's Kennedy is, from the start, probably thornier and more uneasy than the woman ever was. Portman and Larrain have sharpened her and superimposed her story on a rigorously crafted but resolutely cold surface. "Jackie," though endlessly fascinating, can feel like a character study conducted on a surgical table.

Larrain, the talented Chilean filmmaker of the Oscar-nominated "No" whose equally complex "Neruda" is also out soon, is interested in dissecting Kennedy but not solving her. "I'll settle for a story that's believable," says Crudup's reporter. The truth, Kennedy says, is out of reach.

What is within the grasp of "Jackie" — aside from a compelling, intricate performance from a fully committed Portman — is a sense of how difficult it may have been for Kennedy to make things look so easy. With preternatural poise, she served as a bulwark of decorum and order against the chaos of the times. It's chilling now to hear the advice of Kennedy family friend William Walton (the great Richard E. Grant) after Lee Harvey Oswald is gunned down. He tells Kennedy to take the kids to Boston and "build a fortress." ''The world's gone mad, Mrs. Kennedy." 

Read full review at Daily Mail

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

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.

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.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

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