Natalie Portman on taking on an icon in “Jackie”

“She talks about how first ladies have to leave the White House”, Portman said.

But I digress. Portman’s performance has been highly anticipated, generating major Oscar buzz in a movie season that seems, so far, to be a little light on old-school star power.

This is the story of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – wife of former US President John F. Kennedy.

It was also, he notes, different from how Jackie Kennedy sounded in other circumstances. The New York Times reported that in a taped interview with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the former First Lady claimed that her aim was to provide President Kennedy with “a climate of affection and comfort and détente” at all times.

To prepare for the role, Portman watched many of Jackie’s interviews, as well as a tour that she gave of the White House in a TV special that aired in 1962. “The pink suit with JFK’s brains on it that she chose to keep on after the fact, because she was already aware that it would be symbolic for people, that she was a living testimony to the events of what happened”.

The film, however, isn’t out to provide answers.

Besides Crudup, Portman’s co-stars in “Jackie” include Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig and John Hurt. It was really hard when I started out. Consistency or arc is really a narrative fiction.

Both Michelle and Natalie are mothers too – Michelle to 11-year-old daughter Matilda and Natalie to five-year-old son Aleph and expecting her second child. Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain’s film – one of the year’s best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget. Darren Aronofsky had the property, and then he decided not to direct it. And Noah Oppenheim’s script is rife with the kind of dialogue an actress would sell her soul for: witty, provocative, layered and meaningful beyond the scope of this story. “I mean, it just won’t ever be right”. “Let’s take each other’s hands and jump'”. Larrain delights in the beauty of bringing an audience to “that indeterminate place”.

“I’m consistently surprised that male directors aren’t making more movies with female characters or putting more than one female character in a movie”. We will never know the depths of it, but the film’s relentlessly real, nearly documentary approach to the subject gives us an bad inkling of that ordeal.

“I think, at this stage of my career, I want to just work with people I’m interested in and feel connected to, ” Portman said. “You can totally misunderstand tone, but still it can work”.

Although the film features some flashbacks to Jackie’s life at the White House before the assassination and before her tour video of the White House, it is more of the days after the former USA president was assassinated.