Natalie Portman explores the mysteries of Jackie Kennedy

But she had another when she was speaking in private.

“I worked with a coach, Tanya Blumstein, who was wonderful on the dialect and voice”.

She is already a parent to 5-year-old son Aleph with husband Benjamin Millepied. On top of the emotions, Portman also nails Jackie’s accent. What they pull off is even more impressive-a story we all know is remade as urgent, raw, and terrifying. She is the most unknown known person there is. It opens the door for some clunky speechifying as the film progresses from horror and confusion to profound grief and soul-searching (some pretty heavy but nevertheless effective scenes where she confesses to a priest played by John Hurt do a lot of the heavy lifting), but it’s nevertheless a bold proposition.

At one point in 2010, Steven Spielberg was considering producing a Jackie Kennedy miniseries for HBO. That day, she famously chose her strawberry-pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat. But for all her placidity as a celebrity, as a performer, Portman’s presence mirrors Jackie Kennedy’s unsettling mixture of maturity and precociousness, and this has been true from the very first time she graced the screen in Luc Besson’s assassin thriller Leon: The Professional. While she kept up a defiant, poised front to the cameras, behind the scenes she was collapsing-cradling her husband’s brains in her lap in that auto, wandering drunkenly around the Oval Office in a haze. “She’d never been portrayed as a fully formed human being”.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine. One in particular all but stalked the writer. Her performance – a deserving victor of the Academy Award as Best Actress – teaches all other actors how to bring their own passion to the tricky challenge to recreate and interpret history. “He somehow got my cell number”. And then a close-up of Jackie that lasted for a while while she walks. How did you manage to make the role your own? With a strong script from Noah Oppenheim and director Pablo Larrin giving an outsider’s perspective on the matter, Jackie is hauntingly poetic view of an untold story.

Years dragged on as Aronofsky searched for a new director. The phrase that bugs me the most is, ‘I know exactly how you feel.’ No you don’t. “I just gained weight and it made me hungry”. Following a bitter election season in which former first lady Hillary Clinton fell afoul of the same restrictions at a more executive level, the defiantly exclusive focus of Larraín’s portrait – in which JFK himself makes only the most fleeting of flashback appearances – carries a piquantly gendered subtext. I’d even call it funereal.

Would you say that to a guy?.

One of the most haunting scenes I’ve seen this year is after the president is shot and we watch Jackie holding him while the auto is speeding down the highway on the way to the hospital. “It had to be Natalie”.

Larrain, 40, met the star in Paris, where Portman was living at the time, and outlined his script changes. 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 terrible, this is too sad. She blushes, ” I remember at the beginning, actually, everyone was kind of thinking, ‘Uh oh. Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy and the supporting cast includes Peter Sarsgaard as Robert F. Kennedy. Larrain delights in the beauty of bringing an audience to “that indeterminate place”. After sharing this film with older children, take time to ask how they might react to such intense situations. The reporter who did that story in real life was Theodore White, most famous for his “Making Of The President” books. “So it was like they were dancing”. Larraín stopped during one take and played footage of the actual tour just to check.

I was complaining to somebody about what a bad day I was having, and he responded with “I’m sorry for all your misfortunes”. Though that template generally serves the most boilerplate of biopics, Larraín doesn’t use it as a guide to the narrative so much as to let Jackie speak for herself.