Just returned from Dallas, where her husband was assassinated as he sat by her side in the back of a presidential limo, Jacquelyn Kennedy finds herself surrounded by people with little help to offer. A reporter, summoned by the widow to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, asks, “What did the bullets sound like?” Her brother-in-law suggests she see a priest, and while Jackie is reluctant (“Bobby, I want to talk to the press”), a priest is duly wheeled in. “Let me share with you a parable,” he says.
Jackie seeks to inform us that the glittery Kennedy Administration launched a new style of politics—politics as a campaign of never-ending media manipulation. (We see a careful recreation the White House tour Jackie whisperingly conducted for CBS-TV in 1962, faithfully rendered in primordial black-and-white.) But this is hardly a fresh observation; and so by default, the movie devolves into a suffocating examination of its star, Natalie Portman, as she unleashes a tsunami of acting—weeping, simpering, smoking and snapping—much of it captured in relentless, oppressive close-ups. (Portman’s accent seems odd at first—it feels haunted by the ghost of Gildna Radner’s old “Baba Wawa” character on SNL. A quick visit to YouTube, however, establishes that this is in fact the way Jackie Kennedy spoke, so…points for meticulous preparation.)
The movie doesn’t feel like it’s really about anything—it has no warmth, no spirit, and its dialogue is sometimes dead, writes Kurt Loder.
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