In ‘Jackie,’ a fractured Kennedy fable

“The accent is very specific”.

“When it’s clean, it’s foreboding”. Our heroine is in a similar funk, though her pain is far more personal and visceral than ours: She is, after all, Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman), and her husband has just been murdered.

Her greatest coup, perhaps, is to invent – not exactly out of whole cloth, but with a degree of creative license – the so-called myth of “Camelot” during a series of interviews with a reporter.

During a recent round-table interview with reporters in NY, the Oscar-winning actress was asked about the film’s horrific scene in which her character, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, holds her dying husband after he was shot in the head, while they were riding in a vehicle through Dallas in 1963.

Meanwhile – a smaller but sharper problem – she was about to lose her home in the White House to the new president and first lady, Lyndon Baines and Lady Bird Johnson.

Bringing an end to months of anticipation and excitement, Pablo Larraín’s starry biopic Jackie is barrelling down on its December 2 release date and in a last-ditch attempt to drum up the film’s award credentials, Fox Searchlight has today rolled out two new TV spots and a rather poignant clip showcasing Natalie Portman as the former First Lady.

Yet she wasn’t sure the role was right for her. While Portman looks as poised and composed as we ever imagine Jackie Kennedy was or should be, her eyes, the quiver in her voice, and the way she smokes her cigarette suggest something otherwise.

“She always had a sense of destiny about herself”, says Wilson. (The picture offers no acknowledgement of written sources for any of the private interactions depicted in Noah Oppenheim’s script.) Crudup manages to project White’s lightly banked resentment of Jackie’s calculating remarks (like her pointed emphasis on JFK’s love of the Broadway hit Camelot-a ideal metaphor for the Kennedy era, no?).

Her modesty is unnecessary.

Natalie Portman is headed to Palm Springs. Portman takes her cues from the line in the script, I lost track somewhere, what was real, what was performance.

Portman starred earlier this year in A Tale of Love and Darkness, a project which marked her feature directing debut. Though many would try to convince her that it should be a quiet and peaceful one, Jackie remains strong in her convictions and refuses to have the procession any other way. Viewers will be able to see how Mrs. Kennedy handled her devastation following the assassination of her dear husband as well as how she would preserve her husband’s legacy.

Her latest comments on Hollywood diversity appear to be something of a change of tune from what she has said in the past. Not a journalist, not a historian, not a scholar. And I think that was a very tough moment for her, because that’s the moment, those six and a half minutes, she’s saying, he’s going to die, I’m a widow, my life has changed, I’ve got to leave the White House, what am I going to do, this is frightful, this is too sad. And she was very close, man.

The film deals only tangentially with JFK’s reputation as a womanizer, in fleeting remarks.

Very quick. It does not take long. “If an actor’s giving a safe performance, no one in the room except the person they’re talking to can even hear them. I mean, it just won’t ever be right”.

Portman feels she gained insights into why Jacqueline publicly tolerated Jack’s philandering.

“It gave her the insight to understand that the story that is told is much more important than what actually occurred”, she said.