Running time: 95 minutes
Director: Pablo Larraín
Stars: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt.
Pablo Larrain, the off-beat Latino film maker, gives us a haunting portrait of a great woman in deep distress, facing the most harrowing moments of her celebrity life. It is the story of Jacqueline Kennedy, the most celebrated First Lady of the United States, who became part of the Kennedy legend. In the days following the dramatic assassination of her husband, who fell dead in her lap during that fatal visit to Dallas, she is confronted with the question of unmerited suffering grief and sense of loss, compounded by her responsibilities as mother to two little children and being part of a great political family whose legacy she is concerned with. Told in an unconventional non-linear manner, the movie strikes us with its emotional power and deep searching questions of faith and grief. The movie gives us an intimate picture of a suffering woman more than the outward gloss and glamour, shifting between the past and the present, joy and grief, the glorious days of Kennedy’s life in the Whitehouse and the graphic horror of that most tragic moment in American presidential history. We are also made to realize that the assassination of presidents is part of American history through Lincoln, McKinley Garfield and now Kennedy. Apart from its political and psychological aspects, the movie takes up the perennial Biblical issue of unmerited suffering and choice. It comes when, at the suggestion of Robert Kennedy; Jackie seeks spiritual counsel from a Catholic priest. Jackie responds to her predicament in the manner any normal human would do. Why did she have to suffer this? Why is God cruel? Why is He hiding from us? The priest is down to earth and does not pretend that he has the answers ready. He cites the parable of the blind man healed by Jesus and tells her that she is ‘chosen’ like the man in the parable so that God’s glory is revealed. His answers indicate how conventional piety doesn’t work in a profoundly painful situation like this. When she remarks that God is playing a funny game by hiding all the time, he tells her: “The fact that we don’t understand his ways isn’t funny at all.” It is hard for her who has lost two babies at childbirth and a husband through violence to accept a God like this. But the priest asserts that God is working through Jackie.
The film so vividly recaptures images from the Kennedy era while embedding them in a historical and personal setting, with compelling performances from the artists in their respective roles .The background score is powerfully evocative.
Some Quotes from the Movie
“God is love and is everywhere”.
“What kind of a God takes a husband from his two children?”
“There comes a time in man’s search for meaning when one realizes that there are no answers and when you come to that horrible unavoidable realization, you accept it or you kill yourself or you simply stop searching.”
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