Jackie

Jackie (2016) covers the four days after the assassination through Jacqueline Kennedy's eyes. The film is framed by an interview. A journalist comes to Hyannis Port and she talks to him. But she sets the rule at the start: she will decide what gets published. Through the conversation she withdraws things she has said and he does not write them down. That interview is real. It took place with Theodore H. White a week after the assassination and appeared in Life. In it she described her husband's time in office as Camelot, and that word became the permanent name for the Kennedy presidency. She controlled the final text. That is the real subject: a woman constructing an account of how her husband will be remembered, and doing it in the middle of her grief. The form of the funeral is part of the same matter. She wants a procession on foot; security objects and she insists, because she knows how the image will survive. Interspersed is a televised tour of the White House; she really made such a programme in 1962 and the film restages those recordings. Pablo Larraín directed; he is Chilean and this was his first film in English. Natalie Portman was nominated for best actress. Mica Levi's score is not tonal and is the most unsettling thing in the film; it was nominated as well. The assassination comes late and is shown directly. Stéphane Fontaine shot it on 16mm; the image can be mistaken for archive from the period. It runs 100 minutes. Good for: biographical drama, history, and performance. Less good for: the narrative is deliberately fragmentary and the assassination is graphic.