Oh, Jackie...

Natalie Portman in Jackie

If I may be allowed to namedrop for a moment I once interviewed Gary Oldman when he was in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the conversation turned, as it did in almost every interview he did for the movie, about the make-up that was required to make him look like a 400-year-old man.

It did awful things to his skin apparently with terrible rashes and his eyes were constantly sore from the hard, coloured contact lenses he was required to wear. But there was one constant that he kept in mind through all this. ‘It’s really important to make sure that you wear the make-up and that the make-up doesn’t wear you’.

And that, by a circuitous route, is what’s wrong with Jackie. This is a film about Jacqueline Kennedy, played by Natalie Portman, in those days towards the end of November 1963 between the assassination of her husband, US President John F Kennedy, and his funeral. It was a time when Mrs Kennedy became tragically iconic because of the outfit she wore on the ill-fated motorcade and afterwards. It was a pink Chanel suit and she became forever identified with it.

Much of Jackie is about that suit, especially in its blood-spattered phase, but the problem is that, to go back to Gary Oldman, the suit wears Portman and not the other way round. This film, by Chilean director Pablo Larrain, is an homage not to Jacqueline Bouvier, or Jackie Kennedy, or Jacqueline Onassis. It’s really all about that suit in a series of scenes that almost fetishize its significance.

It’s not a film about a person, it’s a film about a media construct. Portman forsakes characterisation for impersonation. She holds herself still and inert – like FLOTUS Barbie – and gets the accent spot on, including that fetching little speech impediment. But so much effort goes into the physicality and vocality of the role there is no room for performance. Portman isn’t a character but a simulacrum of a tragic figure.

Larrain constructs his film like a series of tableaux vivants around key scenes in Dallas and its aftermath. None of this makes for very smooth viewing.

Jackie’s painfully awkward telecast in which she invites the American public on a tour of the White House is reconstructed in all of its cringe-making detail. It’s hard to bear in mind that these are the first steps along the road that ultimately gave us the ultimate media-savvy power couple in the Obamas.

But the strangest aspect of the film is a clunky framing device in which a journalist (Billy Crudup) interviews the former First Lady about the great events. Presumably Crudup is supposed to be Theodore White who was apparently JFK’s favourite journalist, but not even someone as familiar as White may have been would have turned up to interview the First Widow looking like he’d come from an all-night lock-in? The dialogue in these scenes is unbelievably literal and it makes painful watching.

There’s a relatively stellar supporting cast and the cinematography by Stephane Fontaine is excellent. But, no matter how beautifully the film is shot, each immaculately composed frame takes you further and further away from any sense of understanding this enormously complicated woman.