Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

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nitin
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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#51 Post by nitin » Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:32 am

domino harvey wrote:Not just the best film of 2016, but the best in years and years. JFK wasn’t much of a president, and I can’t pretend I ever spent much time thinking of Jackie O., but Jackie is a masterpiece, full of richness in its themes and approach, anchored by a transformative central performance, and so beautifully shot and scored that the film itself as a whole reflects the deck-stacked existence of its subjects.

No was one of the best films of the year it was released, but Jackie takes Larrain to the plane of all-time greatness. I can't even fathom how he pulled off what this film achieves, melding historical accuracy (the film is fully transportive to the era without indulging in period fetishization— this alone qualifies it for deification) with an honest face-value appraisal of grief as filtered through the public eye (one always there, even in private). But beyond even that, the film is a reclamation of the surface, a film that sides with the pretty people, but without empty ego flattery. Jackie deeply understands our social betters (be they beautiful, rich, powerful, or all three) and is honest about it. No wonder the film is so polarizing, we still live in a world where many of us are immunized to even acknowledging there is such a thing!

The film gives us the strains and stresses of always being on, of living the life of the eternal deb and how the shifting spotlight is itself a second death. These are different concerns than the grief that inhibits, say, Manchester by the Sea, but no less valid. Natalie Portman, in a performance that perhaps can only be embodied by someone who herself grew up in the public eye and never left, is tremendous at being Jackie Kennedy, in the same way Ben Kingsley was Gandhi-- it stops being representational and becomes reality. Any historical drama could give us the facts or a fair narrative conjecture of what did or did not really happen. Who cares, this film says, here’s how it all felt, as experienced by someone primed by life to be the First Lady, yet lacking the emotional resources to be the First Widow. It is a film that sells the powerlessness of death better than any I’ve ever seen, and it does so in a fashion of rescuing the Better Thans from the easier vantages of superiority, phony “understanding,” or necrotic idol worship. There is not an ounce of false sentiment, not a speck of misplaced reverence, and yet the end result is one of cemented legacy all over again. Camelot was and briefly is again.
I dont always agree with it (Nocturnal Animals being a recent example!), but I really enjoy the passion in your analyses and views.

But on this one, I wholeheartedly agree. For me, much more than Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, this managed to successfully convey conflicting emotions and tones concurrently. And Portman was nothing short of astonishing. I also walked out of it unable to comprehend how one would even begin to put together such a portrayal.

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Black Hat
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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#52 Post by Black Hat » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:47 pm

domino harvey wrote:Not just the best film of 2016, but the best in years and years. JFK wasn’t much of a president, and I can’t pretend I ever spent much time thinking of Jackie O., but Jackie is a masterpiece, full of richness in its themes and approach, anchored by a transformative central performance, and so beautifully shot and scored that the film itself as a whole reflects the deck-stacked existence of its subjects.

No was one of the best films of the year it was released, but Jackie takes Larrain to the plane of all-time greatness. I can't even fathom how he pulled off what this film achieves, melding historical accuracy (the film is fully transportive to the era without indulging in period fetishization— this alone qualifies it for deification) with an honest face-value appraisal of grief as filtered through the public eye (one always there, even in private). But beyond even that, the film is a reclamation of the surface, a film that sides with the pretty people, but without empty ego flattery. Jackie deeply understands our social betters (be they beautiful, rich, powerful, or all three) and is honest about it. No wonder the film is so polarizing, we still live in a world where many of us are immunized to even acknowledging there is such a thing!

The film gives us the strains and stresses of always being on, of living the life of the eternal deb and how the shifting spotlight is itself a second death. These are different concerns than the grief that inhibits, say, Manchester by the Sea, but no less valid. Natalie Portman, in a performance that perhaps can only be embodied by someone who herself grew up in the public eye and never left, is tremendous at being Jackie Kennedy, in the same way Ben Kingsley was Gandhi-- it stops being representational and becomes reality. Any historical drama could give us the facts or a fair narrative conjecture of what did or did not really happen. Who cares, this film says, here’s how it all felt, as experienced by someone primed by life to be the First Lady, yet lacking the emotional resources to be the First Widow. It is a film that sells the powerlessness of death better than any I’ve ever seen, and it does so in a fashion of rescuing the Better Thans from the easier vantages of superiority, phony “understanding,” or necrotic idol worship. There is not an ounce of false sentiment, not a speck of misplaced reverence, and yet the end result is one of cemented legacy all over again. Camelot was and briefly is again.
I agree with much of what you wrote here hitting on many of the same themes in my own post on the first page of this thread, but have two minor quibbles.

First, I don't think the polarized reception to this from everything I heard had anything to do with a lack of understanding our 'social betters'. In fact I think you lauding it in this way in a ways lumps you in the same ways you're praising the film for I suppose exposing, but that's tangential. People's issue with this film had mostly to due with Kennedy fatigue or rich people problems fatigue, 'do we really need another movie about it?', 'what's the point?'. Then people had issues with the stylization of it which is obviously a matter of taste.

Second, Natalie Portman's level of being in the public eye is completely different than Jackie Kennedy's was and thinking maybe attaining celebrity at a young age is the only way this could have been pulled off is a big stretch. The latter was a beloved global icon of beauty, style and grace existing in a world unsaturated by stardom living under scrutiny & pressure we can not begin to imagine. Natalie Portman's never even come close to achieving that level of fame nor had a husband contemplating the use of nuclear weapons. I'd also add Natalie Portman rubs a lot of people the wrong way, many don't even feel she's good at what she does. The only people who maybe had the life experience to help relate to Jackie Kennedy were Princess Diana & Princess Grace and even then I'd say the latter two were far more relatable to one another than they were to Kennedy.

Like I said minor quibbles, but I agree Jackie was a pretty marvelous achievement.

It'll never happen but I'd go see a sequel to this about her life with Onasis. Who knows maybe Netflix will pony up the cash for a limited run series, I can see Larrain's sensibilities working far better in television than in film,

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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#53 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Apr 03, 2017 10:22 pm

I think this and Neruda are excellent companion pieces. I am still trying to figure out whether what I saw of Larrain's methods in Neruda should cause me to re-assess just what was going on in Jackie. ;-)

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knives
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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#54 Post by knives » Tue Jul 18, 2017 5:29 pm

I'm not entirely certain this film entirely succeeds with Dom's idea especially since Jackie's presentation with this overlap with Rossellini's The Taking of Power which for me is one of the best films of all time. The one really novel moment in the idea of the Kennedys being unique and special in this moment (as soon after she tells the reporter in one of many overly expository scenes) is RFK telling LBJ to sit down. This idea of importance superseding authority and power is really compelling in this moment. The script plays with this a few times, but perhaps too linearly for my taste. I'm sure it is true to fact that Kennedy's concern was with a future legacy, but the mechanics of the now strike me as more compellingly done.

What I found to be the real greatness of the film (which admittedly for now I'm more in the pool of good if not special on the whole) is as Dom (really complete look at the film there) said the idea of Jackie as emotionally built to be first lady, but not a widow. That's where Portman stands out (in the special people theme RFK strikes me as better used) as she presents an inflexible and perhaps immature woman who because of that lack of adaptation manages to get all she knows she needs (but seemingly doesn't want). Like with a lot of Portman's other performances the vocal inflection was initially something I couldn't gel with, but as she went on it worked to a very satisfying whole due to the physical attributes of her performance.

In general I think what keeps me away from the film is the exposition which is really far too excessive, but the one instance where I thought it worked was the final confession with Hurt at about the 80 minute mark. It lays out all the themes well and functions within the narrative in an exciting way. The reporter conversely just seemed there to make things explicit in the most obvious way and the film didn't really need that. Running with the ending his whole thing about her being the mother and her response to that is just seconds later better executed with her starring at JFK during the television interview.


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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#56 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Nov 08, 2019 1:01 am

Ronan Farrow spends an unusual amount of time tearing this movie a new one in his book about the Weinstein scandal, and I learned something new - the writer of this film is the president of NBC News

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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#57 Post by Black Hat » Sat Nov 09, 2019 11:33 am

Whenever Ronan Farrow gets cancelled I'm here for it.

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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#58 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Nov 25, 2019 1:30 pm

I think of the conversation that Domino and I had upthread about "betters" and the shifting role of celebrity in popular culture a fair deal, since it was a constructive and compelling one to me. Anyway, on that note, I thought this would be a good place to put this very good piece by Amanda Hess in today's New York Times about the role that social media has played in killing off tabloid/paparazzi culture and "domesticating the celebrity," in her well said words.

And if people have anything to add, surely we can break it out of the Jackie thread! Otherwise, consider it a footnote.

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Re: Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

#59 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 12, 2020 1:04 am

I don’t know if I buy into the extensive analysis on social betters but I do think this film complicates the process of grief by adding a layer of idiosyncratic social weight to draw a very diverse and personal experience of Jackie O. Her internal chaos between treating her emotional insides and managing a responsibility to the public is exhibited in all its convoluted disorder, and it’s hard to pinpoint when her psychology is attending inward or outward at any given moment. Jackie's initial composed reactions hint at a suppressive coping mechanism that could come off as artificial to some but is deeply true to how a person often responds to acute crises. In a way by making this film so specific to Jackie’s position, it becomes universal as grief is the experience that is most individualized psychologically, and this film expertly demonstrates how turbulent, confusing, unstable, and contextual everything is; noting the seemingly trivial details of each scene with studied awareness, as sometimes we focus on the superficialities of life to distract or draw significance of in forming memory.

And of course there is the other specific factor that Jackie has the rug pulled out from under her in her role as First Lady, the President’s wife, and as Johnson moves in she finds herself becoming pragmatic about how to sell items to pay for her children’s school, partly to sublimate her tragic powerlessness into practical action, partly a reality that she must cope with a drop in status, and partly a shock to the immediate diffusion of her own identity, which was formed through another, and holding onto that identity charges her actions through the rest of the film through focusing on Jack and her ability to construct their place in history, reciprocating her ideological duty and selfishly protecting her sense self through public achievement.

Portman has never been better, and justly remains as enigmatic to us as she is to herself. Despite being well-liked, it's not surprising to me that she lost the Oscar, as the people want someone they can access with empathy more easily. It's a brave and challenging performance, more than she's given credit for (and she's been given many accolades for this one) but it's one of the best I've ever seen. The score is intense but captures the murky swirling of emotions in its own diverse, unpredictable complexity that feels illusive and not of this world - just like the process of grief, let alone juggling multiple roles as wife, public figure, classist icon, and mythmaker. The pull between attention to broad external ideology and attention to personal internal trauma-processing tears one apart in ways even the most artificially imposing music can never emulate, but at least this film attempts a different kind of music that feels like it's crawling inside the skin, like an anxious dream that's always on the verge of turning into a nightmare.

The use of the theme of history is dense, and serves several purposes in the film. There is the idea of history itself as canonized, shaped by those 'betters,' so Jackie can use her power to cement her husband's legacy, and even to choose how she wears a veil in the public funeral, issuing control where she can to make tangible the nebulous impact of loss. The repetitions of “I need to talk to him” regarding Oswald are heartbreaking for this same reason, a desperate need displayed under the robes of a layered exterior, all the more indistinguishable due to her other ‘obligations’ from her social context and capacity for signified evaluations. She needs to get it ‘right’ for that process of signification on top of her grief, shielding and exposing simultaneously. The importance of history becomes Jackie’s mission of identity, securing her own and offering an avenue to charity in giving meaning to the American people. Bobby’s breakdown about accomplishment, struggling to find meaning beyond image, and wishing they did "more" juxtaposes with Jackie’s own reaction to the events in resilience.

This leads to an even more personal, acute grief within the scope of the limitless expansion of history as another contrast of existentialism, where Jackie, with comforts in complacency removed, must face her own place in the grand scheme of things to transcribe definition, and does so by initiating small actions to form meaning such as walking publicly in the funeral procession. Her breaking down and shouting that there should have been more people, cameras, crying, etc. at the funeral in the interview, and the ideation to be killed in front of the funeral audience to the priest, mirrors Bobby’s reaction in the desire for all the tangible attention in the world to comfort her and to validate the immense pain she feels. Nothing can possibly be enough, but the need for "more" is her most authentic, human moment, divorced from the other strings pulling her apart.

And there is the feeling of connection, the intimacy that Jackie brought between the people to the leaders, between the ordinary citizens and these wealthy “social betters” as people with commonalities and shared history through offering a pathway to tangibility and substance. She cemented a legend, contributed to history and helped band together the people with these ideas, ideas which we can attach value to, that are gone but live on in their own way. I don't mean to argue that Jackie was a savior or that she was a great person, but what she did do is prioritize a human drive that she was in the position to initiate: The need to preserve, to remember, to transmit, to make meaning, to make men into icons which become real, to take a “brief, shining moment” and know it’s fleeting and gone but somehow harbor its energy to live on, retain significance, and accrue connotation through exposure to time, but colored by Jackie's actions as an endowment.

Still, here is a story that in being incredibly specific and even repellent in its unrelatable aspects (time period, social standing, power, secrecy, impenetrability, music!) tells the story of the unique circumstances every person is isolated with when it comes to life, let alone an experience as universal as loss. Nobody would ever make a movie about my life, but if they did there would be plenty of excluding adverse details as well as inclusive empathetic ones. The trick here is to empathize with what we can and acknowledge what we cannot as special, intimate contexts that should be treated with compassion, and (hopefully) trigger the curiosity to peer into what we don't understand with humility and willingness to listen by uniting behind humanity.

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