Critics reviews

[One scene] reminded me of Nicole Kidman in Birth, another movie where a widow reckons with her husband's ghost. But these glimpses are brief. Soon it's back to her dull tête-à-têtes with journalists, confidantes, or an impish Irish priest, each strewn with platitudes and drenched in magic hour lighting. The dialogue flails toward the concept of national memory; it induces nothing like the morbid twinge of seeing a former First Lady sink into campy despair.

Larraín plays with the distancing and inevitably artificial nature of the camera's gaze to evoke the alienation of a life lived in public. Whatever happens, we still find ourselves at a distance from her; perhaps she is even distanced from herself. At times, the sumptuously polished aesthetic of these moments even borders on the voyeuristic, reminding us that we too risk becoming spectators, gawping at her pain.

Larraín's film is hollow. Burdened with a terrible, Black List script by Noah Oppenheim, Jackie offers few insights into one of the 20th century's most heavily analysed events, and says even less about grief.

It suggests nothing so much as a half-season's worth of Quality TV stripped down, squeezed together, and then carefully retouched with art-cinema make-up for just the right haunted, lifelike look... Everything about Jackie is calibrated to give the impression of a complex, multi-levelled portrait, and the strain shows at all times.

It appears to be participating in a funeral procession all its own, reveling in the swollen emotions of a young woman who cannot fathom taking one step forward. The viewer simply watches from afar, and that distance makes it difficult to see Portman's character as anything beyond a suffering archetype. While many small details are profoundly beautiful, Larraín's attempt feels weighed down by self-importance, as if history were a wet blanket of one's own making that is ultimately inescapable.

Portman's performance and Larraín's flowing camera overcome a screenplay that too often seems like a one-act play. Larraín and Portman do more than just move a play outdoors. They explode it into lush, grand visions of American history and chaos.

Failing to distinguish itself from all other historical drag revues of late, Jackie indulges in the hoary strategy of placing an iconic figure from a global event under the microscope, in order to give its central actor a chance to flex her muscles against the binds of mimicry. And struggle Natalie Portman does, unbearably for those who recognize this breed of performance as prestige cinema's true uncanny valley.

It struck me as over-determined and textual, like a Todd Haynes movie without a sensual side. Say what you will about Haynes' academic commentaries and significations of repressed desires, but at least they're always related through his fascination with glamor, mystique, and period forms.

Just as Neruda notes the seeds of later history, so here too we glimpse defining moments in the midst of seemingly chaotic events, as Bobby casually sparks Johnson's feud with him by bossing him around even though he is now in command. These scenes are a tour-de-force for Larraín in conjuring the sensation, at once intense yet detached, of intense shock and grief, and for Portman in capturing those feelings.

I can't think of a recent movie that's filled me with ecstasy like "Jackie" did. It left me artistically intimidated and wonderstruck... The film plies between past and present, desperately looking for "Jackie O." She isn't hard to find. With great style and sensibility, Natalie Portman surpasses herself... she redefines modern acting: sublimating the inherent opportunity of the role into something temerously mortal, she might as well die before our eyes, killing herself to exist, unendingly.

Larraín cycles through these various time frames with the sort of dreamy elliptical editing that can trick one into believing a film is more narratively inventive than it is in actuality. Where Jackie falters is in the critique of its subject's public persona versus her private life.

Unfortunately, Jackie's cavalcade of portentous scenes and somewhat turgid dialogue begins to feel like a swirl of "meaningful" signifiers, as opposed to a trenchant exploration of its underlying ideas. Despite its ostensible intimacy of perspective, it traffics in suggestive generalities (of both theme and character) rather than tangible specifics.