Jackie Review by Katherine Clements

Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy

Just one week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963, his widow invited Life Magazine journalist, Theodore H. White, to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. She had a story to tell.

In the resulting piece (which you can read here) White focuses on Jackie Kennedy's hazy memories of that horrific day in Dallas, but at its core is a determined fixation on one idea: the idealisation of something lost. She says:

“At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack like to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
Life Magazine 6 December 1963

Jackie Kennedy was the first to link her husband’s curtailed presidency with the Arthurian myth – the idea of the Kennedy era as a glorious golden age that would never be repeated; an enduring association that entered, and has remained, part of the American political narrative.

The media has long been fascinated with the glamorous Kennedy family and conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination. Numerous films and TV biopics have added layers to the story. The latest of these is Jackie, written by Noah Oppenheim, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Natalie Portman as the enigmatic woman who was such a crucial part of the myth she helped to create.

But this is not really a biopic. The interview with White (played with alternating sympathy and frustration by Billy Crudup) serves as a looking glass through which we watch the assassination itself, the aftermath and JFK’s funeral, all told in flashback through Jackie’s eyes. We are given a snapshot – a momentary insight into a woman who fascinated the public for decades.

Larraín claims that he refused to shoot the film without Portman and it’s easy to see why. Portman’s Oscar-nominated performance is utterly compelling, the similarity almost eerie. She’s worked hard to capture Jackie’s physicality – the formality, the stiff, awkward mannerisms and flat Transatlantic accent that make uncomfortable opposition with moments of intense emotion. The camera seems captivated by her. Lots of close ups leave Portman nowhere to hide - hammering home the intensity of the character’s distress and the painful scrutiny of the media. She knows the eyes of the world are watching.

And this contradiction is at the film’s heart. Portman presents a portrait of a woman teetering on the edge of sanity; one moment trembling and crying, or wandering, drunk and hopeless, around a deserted White House, the next exhibiting extraordinary strength and perception, and a steely determination to get what she wants. Portman portrays Jackie as complex and conflicted. This is not just the story of a grieving wife falling apart or an inspirational demonstration of fortitude, but both, and all the stronger and more human for it.

We get insights in Jackie’s ‘true’ feelings in moving scenes with an unnamed priest (played by John Hurt, in the last film released before his death). As she expresses doubts about her Catholic faith, we sense not just a spiritual crisis but her increasingly tenuous grasp on reality: ‘‘I lost track somewhere. What was real. What was performance.” And we see that her actions are not entirely altruistic.

The extraordinary soundtrack, composed by Mica Levi, serves as a powerful reflection of Jackie’s precarious state of mind. Sweeping strings seem to tilt and slide, lending a feeling of queasy instability. It’s ethereal and otherworldly, with an ominous edge. The film would have been a very different experience without it.

But this is more than just a character study. It asks questions about history – who writes it and who decides what to present as truth. As Jackie astutely says, "When something is written down, does that make it true?" Surely, a question for our times.

So, should we read Jackie as fact or fiction?

Jackie Kennedy, 1957, by Tony Frissell

The real Jackie was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, into a privileged Catholic family. She attended boarding school in Connecticut and Vassar College in New York. By the time she met John F. Kennedy in 1951, she was a promising young journalist working for the Washington Times-Herald. Well read, cultured and stylish, she was, on paper, a perfect politician’s wife. They married in 1953. JFK became President in 1961 when Jackie was just 31. As First Lady, Jackie undertook a vast restoration project in the White House, buying and returning original furniture and many prized historical artefacts. She championed the arts and established the White House as a centre of cultural activity, hosting lavish parties, dinners and concerts. When CBS broadcast a televised tour of the newly restored White House, eighty million Americans tuned in.

Clips from that documentary and other archive footage are used seamlessly throughout - a constant and effective reminder that much of what we’re watching really happened. By 1963, Jackie was already familiar with tragedy. She had suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth before her first surviving child, Caroline, was born in 1957. A son, Patrick, survived only two days, passing in August 1963, only three months before his father’s assassination.

We get a glimpse behind the scenes of the Kennedy presidency too. Peter Sarsgaard puts in a solid performance as Bobby Kennedy, lamenting missed opportunities and railing against the family’s destiny to be remembered as nothing more than ‘the beautiful people’. In reality, JFK’s presidency was marred by Cold War tensions and the Cuban Missile Crisis. His progressive attempts to expand civil rights for African-Americans were limited by his opponents. Some historians have argued that he doesn’t deserve the accolades and that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, led a much more effective administration. But that’s the point here: Jackie knew this and set out to change the story. She understood how her actions in the aftermath of the tragedy would echo long through history. Her real life involvement in JFK’s funeral arrangements, which she modelled after those of President Lincoln, could not have been a more strident statement. It was indeed ‘a spectacle’ fit for royalty.

The family leaves the Capitol after JFK's funeral service.

Ultimately, that’s the genius of this film. It gives us a compelling, moving picture of grief, while simultaneously deconstructing the myth it purports to celebrate. It challenges the narrative while showing us how that narrative was spun. Somehow, it manages to do this sensitively, with respect.

Jackie gives us another interpretation of the JFK story, another version of the truth, another layer to the myth, but a valuable one. After watching, I found myself reading up, wanting to know more about Jackie and her ill-fated husband. And that, to me, is a mark of successfully dramatised history, whether on page or screen. After all, as Jackie observes:  “Sometimes, the characters we read about on the page end up being more real that the men who stand beside us”.

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"Don't Buy a Single Vote More than Necessary": American Elections from Bad to Worse by Catherine Hokin

2016 has been, to put it mildly, something of a year for politics. In the midst of all the madness, surely the nadir has to be the current US presidential election. Wherever you stand, the campaigning has hardly been an edifying spectacle: I have been burying myself in the deliciously imagined West Wing contest between Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits as an antidote to the bile.

 JFK and Joe Kennedy

This is not the place, no matter how tempting, for a commentary on the candidates. Instead I have been having a delve into previous contests to see just how low previous bars have been set. The quote used in the heading is from 1960 and the Kennedy Nixon election, JFK's actual words being: "don't buy a single vote more than necessary, I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide".  It sounds like an admission of dirty-dealing, it was in fact a spoof. Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, was a prime-mover behind his son's political successes (and possibly ambitions) and played a central role in the the election campaign, which was dogged by rumours of 'fixing'. JFK dealt with the issue by spinning it, reading this out as a supposed message from Joe on the eve of the election. The result we all know; the rumours of bribery and corruption within the Kennedy campaign, and mob involvement through Sam Giancana's Chicago crime syndicate, continue.

 'Hanging Chad'

The question of who voted for who (and who made them do it) has bedevilled a huge number of US elections. One of the most hostile, impenetrable and still disputed elections was in 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote (by 250,000) and the electoral college but the Republicans simply refused to accept the result. Commissions were set up, officials were replaced, counts were challenged and both sides out-bribed the other until the result was over-turned and Republican Rutherford Hayes, who had previously conceded, was elected the winner. Here’s hoping Trump can't read the more complex history books. A more recent controversy was the 'hanging chad' debacle which muddied the 2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore, leading to a recount of the Florida ballot and a month's delay before the result could be called. The hanging chad was a small piece of paper caught in badly-punched ballot papers which meant the voting machines couldn't read them accurately. The problem came to light in Palm Beach where voters thought they were punching for Gore but were actually voting for the seriously odd Reform Party led by Christian fundamentalist and Holocaust-denier Pat Buchanan. Given the majority of voters in the area were elderly, Jewish and Holocaust survivors something didn't quite ring true. The joys of technology - suddenly the stubby pencils hanging on bits of string in UK polling booths look rather more appealing.

Disputing the vote after the event is one thing - as we all know, most of the fun happens in the run up to polling day and personal attacks are, as ever, the meat and drink of dirty campaigning. Things went pretty well in the first two elections when George Washington was elected with 100% of the vote but it didn't take long for standards to slip. By the third run out to the polls in 1796 when Federalist John Adams beat Democratic-Republican (yes you read that right) Thomas Jefferson, things had got nasty. Jefferson's supporters accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite and Adams' side cast aspersions on Jefferson's racial background. Adams won but Jefferson became Vice-President and the two men spent the next 4 years openly loathing each other. For those readers blanching at the thought of a Clinton-Trump double act, that kind of cross-party crazy can't happen anymore, except in the West Wing where it is, of course, a good thing.

 Gary Hart on ''The Monkey Business'

Sex scandals will always be the first running place of party spin-doctors and more than one candidate has fallen foul of changing moralities. Alleged illegitimate children (Grover Cleveland), bigamy (Andrew Jackson), infidelity...too many to list. Although Bill is the easy target, my favourite in the 'how not to have an affair in the public eye' has to be Gary Hart, the 1987 Democratic hopeful. As rumours of his extra-marital activities began to circulate, Hart took on the press in an ill-founded JFK-style challenge with the following words: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anyone wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored." I'm pretty sure catching a presidential hopeful on a yacht called 'The Monkey Business' cuddling a glamorous blonde wasn't the Miami Herald's definition of bored: poor old Gary was neatly hoist by his own petard.

If some of the campaigns leave a bad taste, so do some of the winners. Polls are subjective things: Bill Clinton and JFK, for example, don't always fare well when judged on strength of government/economic achievement surveys but are always high in the popularity stakes. Polls can also act as a spotlight on the issues which bruise a country: some of the presidents who are regularly in the bottom five of the popularity rankings are men like James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore who are associated with the worst days of slavery and the horrors of the Civil War. Richard Nixon's legacy will never outrun the Watergate scandal and George Bush will always be associated with the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan and his inability to talk coherently about that, or anything else. And, we all have our own bete-noires - I bet I wasn't the only politically-earnest student with this romantic poster adorning my university breeze-blocked wall. Interestingly my American husband never saw it until he came over here.

Whatever happens in November, the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be fury and challenges and it's all going to get a lot worse before it gets better - that probably applies to after the campaign as much as before. As Abraham Lincoln once said: "Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their backs on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters." It's a good quote and still very relevant, I just wish Woody Allen didn't seem to have it nailed rather better:

"We stand today at a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice."

Good luck USA!