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‘Jackie,’ or the Suffocating Weight of Myth

Film on Jacqueline Kennedy rarely goes beyond a beautifully depicted surface.

Dorothy Woodend 3 Dec 2016TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

Politics is Theatre.

If you need, or want, yet another reminder of this fact, director Pablo Larraín’s new film Jackie will provide a master class in the concept.

As a portrait of former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the film is exquisitely rendered, right down to the cut and drape of Mrs. Kennedy’s famous Oleg Cassini gown in a sorbet shade of pistachio green.

But it is another piece of iconic clothing that takes up the lion’s share of the narrative, the infamous Chanel suit that Jackie was wearing on the day her husband was assassinated.

This attention to fashion may seem a little odd in a film that examines events that shaped U.S. and world history, but it speaks to the woman at the centre of the story. Jackie Kennedy’s obsession with controlling and shaping public perception — whether she was planning her husband’s funereal procession, or refurbishing the White House — is the real focus of the film. Thus, extremely close attention must be paid even to the smallest things. The length of her veil, the waft and drift of a peignoir trimmed with marabou, it is all part of the performance of being the First Lady. Of course, this all fed into the grander notion of Kennedy’s presidency as a golden age of Arthurian proportion.

Barely after a week after her husband’s death, the mythmaking machine was in full swing when Jackie granted an interview to Life magazine. The intent was ostensibly to provide succor to a grieving nation. In Larraín’s film, the interview is not gentle and deferential; instead it resembles a gladiatorial battle. As the unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup) slides in questions sideways, Jackie holds her own. Wielding a cigarette like a combination of rapier and smoke screen, she feints and parries each of the journalist’s questions and reminds him ultimately who holds the power in this situation. Even in her shattered and destroyed state, she maintains a commitment to the demands of history, and the idea of legacy, which is perhaps another word for myth.

Thus was born the story of Kennedy’s presidency described as “a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.”

As the story goes, when the real journalist Theodore H. White turned in his story, he was told that the Camelot angle was sentimental schlock. It was only at Mrs. Kennedy’s insistence that the story ran as is. The backstory to the film’s central narrative is vaguely interesting, but if the intent of the film is to demonstrate that much of the Kennedy myth stemmed from the precise orchestration of this one singular woman, it falls victim to the same Jackie myth-making machine.

Jackie is a self-serious affair, and despite its dedication to getting under the skin of the former first lady, it remains largely on the surface of things — glossy, sleek, and to a certain extent oddly detached. Natalie Portman pours herself, body and soul into the role, embodying Jackie, right down to her cut-glass accent and sculpted bouffant hairstyle. To be fair, the actress’s portrayal is more than just an impersonation. She commits, as they say, and to a certain extent it is an impressive demonstration of her skill and control.

But her performance is just that. The demands of a thespian ego seem perilously close to the surface here. I don’t begrudge women good and demanding roles, and Portman knows she has something considerable in the personage of Jackie Kennedy. But it is too much. Not for a single moment was I unaware that this was an actress playing a part.

It is difficult to get below the surface of persona of Jackie Kennedy. The director himself seems aware of this conundrum, if the number of mirrors, and reflections, that pop up throughout the film are any indication. But even this level of self regard doesn’t solve what is at the heart of the issue — that Jackie’s legendary privacy and self-control make for an opaque rendering. Even in the most visceral moments, recalling the moment the bullet hits her husband, Jackie coolly dictates the details of the shooting, describing a piece of her husband’s skull as “flesh-coloured, not white.”

Jackie is a film that you witness more than you experience. The same control and exactitude that the real Jackie Kennedy employed in choosing paintings and furniture for the White House is employed in the art direction of the film about her doing those very things. Again, the details of fashion leap out. But this carefulness makes for an oddly stultifying narrative. The events around Kennedy’s assassination have been scoured, analyzed and conjectured about to such an extent that you might think there was nothing left to be said, and maybe that’s true.

Watching the story unfold, this remove made me feel like I was only half in and half out of the events onscreen. It is left up to the filmmaker to find different means of capturing the essence of grief and tragedy. Here Pablo Larraín’s cinematic intelligence is amply supported by Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay, but it is composer Mica Levi’s score, with its great wedges of sound, that best establishes the film’s emotional space. It is grief in musical form — shards of it pierce the narrative, creating a profoundly discombobulating feeling. A quality that is met and matched by the film’s kaleidoscopic jumble of past and present, cutting from glittering parties in the White House to the moment the Kennedy motorcade and the assassin’s gun came into precise alignment.

The confusion and numbness that attend great tragedy, where the brain cannot process the changed reality in which it now exists, is most clearly captured in scenes of Jackie drifting through the empty White House, dressed in a wispy peignoir and smoking compulsively. Here, the quality of fairy tale and nightmare combine in startling fashion. The fabled Camelot has become a haunted castle, and Jackie is left alone to wander its corridors and rooms, playacting her way through endless wardrobe changes.

But at the end of all this, what are we left with? The mythology of Jackie Kennedy remains resolute. I didn’t feel like I learned anything particularly new or revelatory about the events surrounding the assassination. But it is curious that even as the American political drama continues to dissolve into more lurid territory, the mythmaking ramps up. Perhaps you can only see things when they are held up to contrast with what preceded them. Thus the Obama White House seems a model of decorum and statesmanship next to the orange clown car coming in. But the Kennedy period seems somehow stuck in amber, immortalized and isolated, and frozen in place.

The film becomes airless, and after a while one simply wants out, to be freed from its sepulchral stuffiness and gloom. As the strains of Richard Burton singing about Camelot give way to the spears of sound of Mica Levi’s score, the convergence between real feeling and sentimental claptrap is made explicit. Levi’s music, almost triangular in nature, like an aural battering ram shatters the icy brittleness that clings to the film. It is a welcome relief to let the sound rush over you, giving voice to something that the film can’t quite embody, namely the horror of blood and bone and savage grief. Performance gives way to something far more genuine and true.

Maybe Jackie ought to be staged as an opera. At least that way, the diva at the centre could scream her head off.  [Tyee]

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