First American foray by Chilean director Pablo Larrain. His film Jackie is a Hollywood co-production with star challenge (Natalie Portman in the title role), leading subject (the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy), battalions of technical positions (we counted nineteen hairdressers in the credits) and obligatory positioning at the Oscars (three nominations in 2017). In a word, heavy. Nevertheless, it is characterized by an airy grace, a vertiginous melancholy, a burning reflection on the American passion of always: to subject the exercise of power to the mastery of the spectacle.
Precise and acute historical moment: one week after JFK’s assassination. Detailed narrative instance: the widow receives, on the terrace of the Kennedy vacation home, a journalist for her first interview in Life magazine. Extreme focus on the heroine: Natalie Portman, in absolute mimetic mode, is on all counts.
From this hard core, the film radiates freely in time and space, cultivates narrative fragmentation, mixes reconstruction and archives with sovereign intelligence, works in a chromatically explosive 16 millimeters, and on a magnificently dissonant funereal composition. of Mica Levi, to reproduce the vintage chromos to better return them.
Two myths
This formal deployment, of intense delicacy, tells a story in some respects as cold as death: namely, down to its affliction, the astonishing sense of the direction of Jackie Kennedy, grieving widow who will fight on all the foreheads to start writing as she sees fit the legend of the late president. It’s his introduction, in his razor-sharp confrontation with the Life reporter, of the Camelot motif, which compares JFK’s tenure to the reign of King Arthur. It is his struggle with the presidential security service to obtain a funeral on foot and on horseback, in a decorum deliberately borrowed from the funeral and, therefore, from the legend of another president whom his assassination helped to sanctify: Abraham Lincoln .
Two myths, of which idealism would be the common point, are therefore superimposed here. That, properly American and democratic of President Lincoln. And that, English and monarchical, of King Arthur. There is, between emotion and calculation, tragedy and comedy, a way of placing President John Kennedy and his family in an idealized perspective that obviously does not correspond to what was the political and family reality of the Kennedys.
Risking being seen as hagiography for better, for worse as a formalistic exercise, Jackie is infinitely better than that: a reflective film that shows that style is a political affair.
