For those of you with no head for historical exactitude, the date that sits solemnly at the bottom of Jackie’s opening scene, as Billy Cruddup’s unnamed journalist approaches the imposing Kennedy enclosure, will serve as little orientation. It is, as one would expect in a time of immense loss, lost amidst a thousand thoughts. Is it a week after? A month? Years? Does it matter?
As they settle in, the journalist and the nation’s widow, time drifts out of the fog, to anchor and then to un-moor. She lays down the rules. He asks the questions. She drifts away. Time and place disintegrate into the haze of grief.
Amongst this Jackie clutches moments from her husband's past to reshape his future. She forcibly presses them into history.
If Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is the fragile sculptor remoulding a life in an idealised image, Natalie Portman is her delicate grief made flesh. Reprinted in light. She is an idea thread through an idea. Part perfect representation, part rounded-vowelled memory. Her pool-eyed image re-vocalises the inception of Jackie’s sought after, in many ways manufactured, Camelot. And in doing so, she invites us to examine its inherent truth, its even more inherent fantasy and, perhaps most importantly, its continued impact on the American psyche.
It is the second time this year that director Pablo Larraín had his way with the biopic. He’s taken two monumental figures and deconstructed their legacies in an effort to interrogate and celebrate them. He’s created cinematic essays out of ideas, coloured with (rather than driven by) the lives at hand. He’s chosen subjects that latch into concepts of deep cultural significance to their respective nations and expanded them to the world at large.
Having seen both Jackie and Neruda, it is difficult to consider these two films as separate entities. They share a common DNA. Like The Wrestler and Black Swan, two films that were developed as a single work till they found lives of their own, Larrain’s double portrait of optimism under fire feeds off itself and to create a more complete whole.
Like Neruda, Jackie is fractious. It doesn't require a steady, linear setting to espouse its ideas, since its ideas are abstract. They are woven from the memory of halcyon potential. Jackie's efforts to rinse these memories of the blood and brains of her late husband are not linear. They often don't make sense, not to her, not to those she makes her capricious demands of. Pain blacks out. Pain folds place over place. Pain jars you back to the moment of death. It intrudes in even the happiest of memories.
So, Jackie sets up a tug of war. On the one hand there is the blackness, the devolution into the Johnsons’ comparative pedestrianism, and the dazzling optimism of the Kennedy's imagination. Of what could have been. Of Camelot.
There is really no irony in Jackie's forceful overlay of Lerner and Loewe's fanciful musical image of King Arthur's court over her husband's own. Jackie, even in her most fervent moments, is under no illusion that her Camelot is anything more than an illusion. She knows, like the mythical king, Jack was a leader ever threatened with compromise and a husband always compromised by philandering. But she buttresses that illusion for her own ends. For the good of her children and for the good of the American people.
Just as Neruda recreated himself in his own image, so does Jackie, Jack. Again we see Larraín, through his subjects, using hope as a weapon. The dream, like the poem, is the antithesis of the fascists' fear-mongering. Jackie, in her modulation of the Kennedy's image, seeks to inoculate America from the darkness that ended the dream before it even really began. As if by reinforcing what could have been the nation could see a surer way forward.
Jackie's hypnotic power lies in how remarkably the film is able balance the its optimism with its pervading despair. Who exactly gets to take credit for that achievement is lost in the depth of talent that has a hand in it. Clearly Larraín's visual conceptualisation (this time with DOP Stéphane Fontaine) plays an inseparable part, but so does Noah Oppenheim's precisely structured screenplay, Mica Levi’s decaying score and Portman's crystalline performance, which smooths Jackie's unmistakable persona trans-time and trans-concept.
For a work so invested in legacy, Jackie serves its subject exceptionally well. It strengthens what we know of the Kennedys even as it cannibalises its factuality. But most importantly, the film finally fills in what history has taught us is the vacuum of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. It places her in a more substantial position in relation to America’s leaders, justifying her fierce devotion to image and placing her at the forefront of the modern perception of personal branding.
Whether there is truth to this is by the by.
What matters is what we remember.
★★★★☆
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