Larraín’s film, shot in spare 16-mm, is looping and dizzy, sad and intimate. Noah Oppenheim’s script, mulling faith and fame and the death of an American fantasy, has a lamenting poetry to it. Mica Levi’s score—her second feature film after her eerie, otherworldly work in Under the Skin—is once again strange and a little frightening, sudden swells of plaintive strings mixing discordantly, but effectively, with all the 1960s period detail. Jackie is an odd, artful psychological study, one that blends stony seriousness with whispers of camp.
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and there’s Natalie Portman as the grieving, shellshocked First Lady. Her presence in the movie is probably the biggest draw for many, and it is indeed a fascinating, deeply committed performance—to use another hackneyed cliché, you can’t take your eyes off of her. When talking about Portman after the premiere last night, I kept calling her performance “huge,” which people took to mean over-the-top or inhumanly outsize. It’s not. But it’s expansive and detailed and rendered with intensity, the most invigorating and significant piece of acting she’s done since 2010’s Black Swan. (To be fair, she hasn’t acted all that much since then.) You can maybe see a bit too much of the work in places, but in a way that’s what makes the performance all the more interesting.
