Jackie

Dir: Pablo Larraín

2016

*****

I don't much care for awards and their ceremonies. Many a great film has been celebrated and endured without a single mention by the Academy, Golden Globes or by BAFTA and don't get me started on the well-past-its-sell-by-date Razzie Awards. So many actors, directors, cinematographers, composers etc have been overlooked but loved and successful anyway, it has got to the point where Awards are simply about money, advertising, designer dresses and the mainstream believing they have choice and variety. Great films are made every year to small but grateful audiences, the balance is way off the mark. However, I am slightly baffled as to why Jackie hasn't received the recognition, in terms of nominations, that it so clearly deserves. I would have thought this would have Oscar written all over it but with only three nominations it's a bit of a mystery. I could be looking into it a little too harshly to suggest that the Academy wouldn't want a vocally left-wing Chilean winning best director but I feel his snub is questionable, as it is by far one of the best directed films of the last 10 years, let alone the last one. At the very least cinematographer Stephane Fontaine should have been nominated, so I'm left puzzled. It is quite right that it was nominated for best costume and certainly for best soundtrack. Throughout the film I wondered who did the music because it was absolutely stunning, little did I know it was my old rival Mica Levi. I DJed for bands in a past life and I had a couple of negative meetings with Mica but my goodness can she write beautiful music. Just when I thought her score for Under the Skin couldn't be topped, she goes and writes one of the most stunning scores ever. So the Academy isn't stupid, it recognizes talent, why didn't Pablo Larraín get nominated? I've never really warmed to Natalie Portman, I've never thought of her as a bad actress but until Black Swan I had wondered what all the fuss was about, after her memorable debut in Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional. She was amazing in Black Swan but there were lots of tricks going on there. In Jackie it is all her, no tricks, just raw emotion and I thought it was an awesome performance to behold. When you play a fictional character there is always room to move, develop and make the person your own but in a biography, particularly one that deals with some of the most famous people in modern history, you have to get it right. Getting it right would have been enough in some respects, Portman gets it right and sores. Between Larraín and Fontaine, the film is made to look just like the 60s in the same way you would experience it looking at an old photograph or old television footage. Larraín used the same sort of method in his 2012 film No, while Jackie is a toned-down version visually, it really does make you feel like you are looking back at the past through a time window. It's staggeringly authentic and Caspar Philipson's incredible likeness to President John F. Kennedy adds to it greatly in the few scenes he is in. It's amazing to think that the film took nearly seven years to get to the screen. The script remained pretty much unchanged all that time with Rachel Weisz set to star and then husband Darren Aronofsky set to direct. Both dropped out after their divorce and at one stage Steven Spielberg was set to direct, thank goodness he didn't. Thankfully Aronofsky stayed on as producer and convinced Larraín to direct, although he took some persuading as he had never directed an English-language film, didn't do biographies and knew very little about the subject matter. He soon agreed though after learning more about Jackie Kennedy and learning that the script was purely about the way she dealt with the aftermath of her husband's death, rather than her whole life. It's a tricky subject for sure, but the structure of seeing the events and aftermath of JFK's assassination through the interview she gave to Life magazine weeks after the funeral was very clever, making for an unexpected experienced of a well-known turn of events. It's absolutely faultless and it shows Jackie's great strengths as well as her weaknesses in the best possible taste and with great respect to the Kennedy family. I was stunned by the film's epic beauty, by the amazing main performance and the fresh approach at telling a historical story. Awards or not, it's a modern classic.