Lucky, then, that Portman found an ideal collaborator in Larraín. But her performance would be insane and outsize in a more straitlaced film. Keen to that fact, Natalie Portman takes the role and goes for broke, delivering a performance of staggering intensity, pitched somewhere between method and camp, between impersonation and utter becoming. But, of course, any Jackie Kennedy film lives or dies by who wears the pillbox hat. Stéphane Fontaine’s camerawork has a wandering grace to match Noah Oppenheim’s elegant script. The thrilling composer Mica Levi has created a keening, evocative, almost threatening score-full of wailing strings that jolt and jab, like they’re taking a knife to Jackie’s well-heeled surroundings. The film is accidentally timely, as many in this country today grapple with the feeling that something huge has just been irreparably broken, a grief and desolation that Larraín prodigiously illustrates. It’s instead a woozy and captivating imagining of a moment in time, when Jackie Kennedy was mourning her husband’s murder as a nation reeled. Pablo Larraín’s swirling and looping opus is way more art film than biopic.
