Chilean filmmaker Pablo Lorrain has made some very good movies including
Tony
Manero in 2008, Post
Mortem in 2010 and No in 2012
but his latest movie, his first in the English language, is certainly not up to
the standard of these three and to my mind nowhere near as good as the hype
would have you believe. Jackie (2016) has been nominated for
three Academy Awards including Best Costume Design, Best Original Score and a
Best Actress Nomination for Natalie Portman, if this years BAFTA's is anything
to go by, will probably manage to win Best Costume Design and certainly not
Best Actress for Portman who mumbled her way through the talky role making it very
difficult to understand what she was saying.
This biographical drama, originally conceived as a HBO miniseries,
basically deals with the week between John F Kennedy assassination on the 22nd
November 1963, his burial and when his wife and two children Caroline and John
Jnr, who died in a plane crash in 1999 at the age of 38, leave the White House
for the last time. Noah Oppenheim's lack lustre screenplay is partly based on
Theodore H White's Life magazine
interview with Jackie Kennedy a week after her husband’s death. It was during
this interview that inappropriately the delusional ex First Lady compared the
Kennedy years with King Arthur's mythical Camelot - the first American
president to encompass the celebrity culture and to spend $2 million on the
restoration of the White House, not quite the Knights of the Round Table.
Larrain's movie is a rather hollow look at the period and at times minds
numbingly boring not helped by the Journalist (Billy Crudup) interview that
adds nothing to the film and would have been better without it. The drama is non-existent
only the scene in Dallas when JFK gets shot during the motorcade shows any
pretence of the story coming to life.
The film also stars Peter Sarsgaard as Robert F Kennedy with whom Jackie
seems to have a rather intimate relationship, although who can blame her when
her husband spent a minimal amount of time sharing her marital bed and John
Hurt as Jackie's father confessor, this was his final film release before his
death in January 2017and shows why he will be missed and to be quite honest the
only actor in this charade to earn his salary.
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