Jackie (2016)

As a Xennial, I knew only so much about Jacqueline Kennedy. I had no mental picture of her and probably never watched any footage of her. Thus, Jackie could never mean the same thing for me that it does for my parents or many of the Meetup members who watched with us. But I'll remember her for sure now.

The movie begins with an oddly unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup, reportedly playing Theodore H. White) meeting the ex-First Lady (Natalie Portman) at her new house about a week after her husband's assassination. Having been a journalist herself, she takes a rather bitter approach to the interview, often accusing him of lurid motives and saying her most interesting things off the record. We may view their scenes as glue for the rest, as the flashbacks that make up about 90% of the runtime -- ranging from happy memories of the last year or so to the funeral -- do not follow chronologically.

I guess time jumps have grown in popularity because they help break up monotony and keep viewers alert. Meetup leader Brian would have preferred less of that, and I'm undecided on it. Still, he agreed that the cuts were done well. You shouldn't feel lost for long. If there's a moment you can never place precisely in the timeline, you probably won't care.

More bothersome is the camerawork. From the opening, I thought, "Enough with the tight shots! I get that you want us to see her face in detail, but nobody stands that close in real life!" The camera's not especially steady, either.

By and by, I realized that director Pablo Lorrain (previously best known in the U.S. for No) must have meant to discomfort us. We are to feel Jackie's pain in terms of a whirlwind of attention and very little privacy. For the same reason, she appears in nearly every scene, rarely by herself, thus rivaling Black Swan for the most screentime for Portman. (It's probably no coincidence that Darren Aronofsky is a producer and had been slated to direct.)

Really, pain is what the story's all about. It's hard enough when a beloved husband suddenly, unexpectedly dies. It's worse if you're right next to him when he gets his brains blown out (in a graphic moment that shocked me even when I knew it was about to happen). Then you have the difficulty of explaining to your very young children why Daddy will never return. On top of that, the remainder of the First Family will have to move out of the mansion shortly. And all the while, you have to keep your head cool enough to make preparatory decisions, especially when in public. No wonder she turns to substances in worrisome amounts.

Jackie does have brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard) on hand for support some of the time. He seems to do a better job of keeping it together, tho he swears inappropriately. Sometimes they're at odds with each other. The biggest issue at this point is how big a show they want to make of the funeral, seeing as Lee Harvey Oswald might not have been the last assassin around town. Jackie vacillates and eventually goes big to avoid a cowardly image, because image means a lot to a First Lady.

I half get the impression that Jackie is accustomed to having everything her way. Perhaps she's only like that when deep in mourning, understandably. But curtailing my view of her as an egotist is her repeated insistence that she never really wanted to be a First Lady -- and her advice not to become one. It means constantly wearing a mask.

Speaking of which, yes, Portman does a bang-up job. And I don't need to take others' word for it that her weird, initially distracting voice -- breathy, slow, legato, with a hard-to-place accent -- matches the real deal quite nicely: Some of the flashbacks use actual audio of the First Lady. Sarsgaard stands a shot at an Oscar nomination as well, tho his voice is slightly off.

The scoring rates a mention. Composer Mica Levi, 29, is relatively new to the business and wasn't sure what the studio would do with her work. Her technique is simple but powerful. Brian, again, thought it overdone. It certainly commands your attention when nobody speaks. Me, I dig it. Good music, even in the background, should stay with you. Maybe you'll prefer the occasional playing of the theme from Camelot.

Meetup members were wondering how much of the story corresponds to reality. Certainly Jackie's conversation with a priest (John Hurt) about her crisis of faith would not have been recorded, and from the way it plays out, I'm sure the writer threw it together out of pure imagination. But at least IMDb doesn't list many goofs yet, and the few it does are inconsequential.

I predict that Jackie will take home at least one award in more than one ceremony but fall short of Best Picture or the equivalent. It's charming and poignant; you just probably won't want to watch more than once.