Jackie review: a seductive study of Jacqueline Kennedy, grief and the making of a legend

★★★★½
(CTC) 100 minutes, opens Thursday

Pablo Larrain's Jackie works by stealth. At first it's hard to concentrate on anything but Natalie Portman's meticulously engineered reproduction of Jacqueline Kennedy's speech patterns and intonations. Is it too much? Too careful? Too contrived? I thought so. Then I ceased to care. The film's dissonant rhythms and unexpected riffs had taken over and I was seduced by the weirdly intimate effect that Larrain conjures up.

I went into the film as a sceptic. Could there be anything more to say about Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband's assassination? Wasn't it all there in the unforgettable photograph of her wearing the blood-stained suit that she'd refused to take off?

Yes and no. After a while, the question itself becomes irrelevant. We may know it all but the film goes one step further and achieves a curious form of osmosis. It's in the urgency of Mica Levi's discordant score and the fractured structure of Noah Oppenheim's screenplay. Its jumble of flashbacks seems to take us travelling inside Jackie's head. And while much of it may be imaginative speculation, an insistent strain of plausibility runs through it. This is because it takes its cues from the remarkably frank interview she gave the historian Theodore H. White during those first few days. The tone, the mood and much of the film's dialogue are there on the page.

Natalie Portman's Jacqueline Kennedy is meticulously engineered.Credit: Stephanie Branchu

White, too, is in the film – or rather, there's a version of him. Billy Crudup plays a character we know only as The Journalist and Jackie talks candidly with him, as she did with White. But in reality, she requested the interview with White, whom she thought of as "a friendly". In the film, the interview is given grudgingly. She agrees to it because of her overriding determination to promote JFK's legacy. At the same time, she can't divorce this particular journalist from the media at large, so there's a kernel of animosity investing their interview with a current of tension.

Larrain also makes striking use of archival footage using CGI and somehow stripping it of any hint of artificiality to meld it with the immediacy of the close-ups and hand-held camera work that otherwise define his style. The flashbacks to the assassination itself have the impressionistic force of a nightmare. And we are with Jackie, experiencing the depths of her loneliness as Lyndon Johnson and his entourage begin to take control. Her desire to secure the Kennedy White House's place in history is becoming increasingly obsessive, and the terrible gap between past and present increasingly poignant. Here again, Larrain brings archival footage to bear in flashbacks to the administration's heyday, re-creating Jackie's televised White House tour and the Pablo Casals concert which did so much to characterise the tone and culture of the Kennedy era.

Just over 50 years on, when you can go to YouTube and watch Michelle Obama performing a karaoke duet with a TV chat show host, it's hard to believe that occasions like this one brought a new age of informality to the White House, but that's the way it was. While Obama fondly embraces the camera as a close confidante, Jackie approaches it warily, yet to learn its language. Just out of range, Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), her aide and childhood friend, hovers, coaxing her into smiling.

The invocation of the Kennedy White House as a latter-day Camelot was Jackie's idea. She gave it to White after telling him about JFK's habit of playing the soundtrack of the Lerner and Loewe musical, which he loved, late into the night. In its boldest scene, the film has her do the same thing while frantically trying on dress after dress, as if her wardrobe contains the key to her identity and she's in great danger of losing it.

John F Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) and Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman).Credit: William Gray

The script could have easily been overly sentimental about her relationship with Bobby Kennedy – played by a terse and watchful Peter Sarsgaard. Instead, there's a tacit understanding between them, tinged with something more combative. My grief is greater than yours is the unspoken line hanging in the air during a tense exchange they have about the administration's unfulfilled aspirations.

Yet the climactic funeral procession along Connecticut Avenue to St. Matthew's Cathedral is both tragic and triumphal. Jackie has got her wish, JFK, to her mind, has been given his due – a funeral as grand as Abraham Lincoln's – and Larrain has carried off a perfect fusion of the personal and the political. The story of one woman's loss has become a study in America's sustaining need to turn its leaders into myth.