Palm Springs Film Fest to Honor Natalie Portman

Although Jackie might have initially struggled with her husband’s indiscretions, she grew up with her father being in the same situation. Both started acting around 11 years old and more than 20 years later, they are two of the most talented and well respected actresses in Hollywood.

Q: What was your perception of Jacqueline Kennedy before this film?

In one of the scenes of the movie, Jackie wears one of her famous coats with a scarf tied around her neck – another one of her fashion staples.

She added that while filming the scene, she was stunned to learn that Jackie, who can be seen climbing on the back of the vehicle in the real-life footage of the assassination, was actually trying to retrieve parts of the president’s brain that had fallen off. Though fragile, she has an exacting notion of how her story should be told. His film deepens the general understanding of this person at this bad time, while also keeping her truest and deepest thoughts exactly where they must be – out of our reach. Moments of Jackie alone, removing her bloodied pantyhose, looking for Kennedy’s burial site in the rain and mud at Arlington, smoking cigarettes she didn’t want the public to see, or simply wandering around her empty bedroom, alone, are haunting.

The new film, Jackie, stars Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy in the historic three days following JFK’s assassination.

“This is not my strength to learn a voice, learn an accent, move like a person”, admits Portman. “It’s not my skill”. More surprisingly, this story of an American legend was directed by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, who’d never worked in English before.

“It’s obviously flattering to have positive response to the film because that’s what you want when you’re making a film”, Portman said.

The film “Jackie”, out in limited release Friday, explores the nuances of these public and private sides of the enigmatic figure in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of her husband in 1963 as she plans the funeral, exits her home, comforts her children and tends to her husband’s legacy. “They said, ‘Oh, she speaks French and she wears these fancy clothes, and she does her hair amusing'”. From the first unnerving strains of the hypnotic score by Mica Levi (Under the Skin), the film thrusts us into a world out of balance, offering mosaic-like glimpses that speak to her state of mind under unbearable pressure. Either that or she’s just unafraid to try any kind of role.

It was also, he notes, different from how Jackie Kennedy sounded in other circumstances. “I used to make [men] smile”, she tells the journalist. “I’m no icon and I’m not a symbol”. With breathtaking speed, she goes from cradling her dead husband’s head in her lap to witnessing Lyndon Johnson’s swearing-in on Air Force One, all while wearing a pink Chanel dress still caked with blood. “I don’t know where it came from, because there’s no one in my family who was ever a performer”, Portman offered, explaining that her parents encouraged her to be a doctor or a lawyer.