Despite Natalie Portman's Performance, Jackie Disappoints

Years ago, I compared an expertly constructed but ultimately bad French film to an exquisitely bound volume of a teenager’s goth poetry. That analogy comes to mind again watching Chilean-born director Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, a portrait of Jackie Kennedy from 1961 to 1964. On paper, it has all the ingredients for a successful film: an impeccable lead turn from Natalie Portman, an unconventional structure that avoids the usual biopic pitfalls, even a score by brilliant composer Mica Levi. In the end, only Portman’s acting genuinely stands up. This is grief porn — a one-note wallow in sadness that’s as exploitative as Cannibal Holocaust in its own polite way. And I mean “porn” literally: Larraín has the bad taste to restage the Zapruder film, with Jackie cradling her husband’s brains in her lap. Levi’s score, which largely consists of downbeat minimalist string drones, disappoints too.

Larraín has made three films that have been released in the U.S. this year. The first, The Club, was a homophobic look at a home for disgraced priests. The second and best of the trio, Neruda, plays around with devices from Latin-American literature to offer an unusual biopic of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Jackie shows signs of the same ambition, gone horribly awry.

There’s no real conventional narrative here. The film alternates between the shooting of a 1961 TV show in which Jackie shows off the White House, and a plethora of post-assassination material. Most of the latter is organized around a lengthy interview between Jackie and a reporter played by Billy Crudup. Jackie offers tantalizing hints about her inner life, then takes them off the record. The rest of the time, she responds to the immediate aftermath of the assassination and consults with her priest about her feelings of depression. She goes back and forth about whether she should expose herself to the public again, alongside JFK’s casket.

In Jackie, JFK is treated much like the promiscuous girl in a slasher movie: He’s around to look glamorous and then be graphically killed off. Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) gets much more screen time. While he questions JFK’s accomplishments in one scene with Jackie, the film devotes much of its final third to building up the myth of “Camelot” — that special, magical spirit that took over the White House while the Kennedys occupied it. Despite revelations about JFK’s infidelity and drug use, Camelot still seems impermeable.

In a sense, it’s refreshing that Jackie devotes itself to a small period of time in its heroine’s life, as birth-to-death biopics tend to be a bloated drag. But it’s nevertheless limited by the period it chooses to cover. The Jackie it depicts is a depressed mess. Far from being a “strong woman,” she walks around in a daze. The film romanticizes this state, dwelling on details like her decision to wear bloodied clothes in public and luxuriating in her first post-assassination shower. While Jackie wasn’t an artist or someone who took her own life, I’m reminded of the worst aspects of the cults that have formed around Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis and Nick Drake.

In real life, Jackie Kennedy became Jackie O., marrying Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, had a string of run-ins with a photographer who became a stalker, and wound up editing books. This life story suggests a complexity that’s missing from the film. Portman’s performance does hint at an inner strength, particularly in the magazine interview, but the script betrays her. There’s something potentially quite powerful about the mix of grief, political intrigue and glamour that Jackie occupied for a while. It’s too bad Larraín is more interested in close-ups of Jackie washing blood off her face.

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Jackie

R, 99 minutes

Now playing at the Belcourt