‘Jackie’ is a strong movie about the deep funk following a tragedy

To do this Portman trained with dialect coach Tanya Blumstein and repeatedly watched Jackie’s White House tour recordings. When he talked to the producers, director Larrain even said that if not because of Portman, he wouldn’t do the film “Jackie”.

The movie portrays a grief-stricken first lady demanding that her husbands’ funeral be modeled after that of Abraham Lincoln.

Natalie Portman would be “terrified” to hear what the real Jackie Kennedy thought about her movie portrayal if the former U.S. First Lady was still alive. And that’s why you were like, oh, she’s Jackie, because I can’t answer the question who she is. People will not stop asking about her personal life, and she tells to the journalist, “Don’t marry the President”. Sometimes Larraín and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim shift off course, spelling out the internal narrative through tightly cropped, close-up conversations between Jackie and, for example, a priest (John Hurt) or Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), that illuminate comparatively little and play as more intrinsically earthbound than the transcendent moments in which she is quiet and alone. (There’s a fantastic scene in which Jackie dresses down Jack Valenti, an LBJ aide, for trying to push her out of her own husband’s wake.) Camelot was the Kennedy’s self-made image, one Jackie held on to for dear life, and with the death of her husband she ended up setting it in cement for the rest of nation as well. A new film pulls back the curtain to reveal things we did not know about one of the world’s most famous women.

All things considered, Portman says that Jackie was more than just well educated, but also keenly aware of more than she was given credit. What were those seven minutes like for Jackie Kennedy holding her husband’s exploded head on her lap is what the scene and her character need to convey?

It was also, he notes, different from how Jackie Kennedy sounded in other circumstances.

PORTMAN: (As Jackie Kennedy) No, because I never said that. She really took authorship of the story during a period of the most intense mourning, shock, and grieving. As she planned the funeral arrangements, protected her children and confided in her closest allies, she knew every one of her actions would determine her late husband’s legacy. Portman recently came to NY to speak about the experience of making the film. In the film’s one significant flashback, a TV tour of the White House that Jackie hosted two years before JFK was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, we see a woman passionate about preserving the legacy of art and décor in the Presidential residence but anxiously reluctant to let the camera (or anyone) get too close.

PORTMAN: (As Jackie Kennedy) I’ve changed my mind. And I’d imagine it’s impossible to have any perspective from that vantage point, but I can assure you that it was a spectacle. But Jackie’s mostly depressed and despondent, struggling to maintain composure and mostly succeeding in bumming everyone out by talking about other presidents who were assassinated while in office.

“We enjoyed that so much”, Larrain said.