In the simplicity of its title, “Jackie” lays claim to a truth, uncluttered and clear. Here, we are encouraged to believe, is the Jacqueline Kennedy—or, at any rate, a Jacqueline Kennedy more plausible and more knowable than any version we have seen hitherto. Every actress who has assayed the role, including Jacqueline Bisset and Jaclyn Smith (even the names chime), must now make way for Natalie Portman. As the film begins, she fills the screen, head on, in the first of innumerable closeups, obliging us to ask: Is this woman submitting to our scrutiny or daring us to break down her defenses?
One thing we can already be sure of: Jackie is a widow. Following John F. Kennedy’s death, in 1963, she retreats to Hyannis Port not merely to recuperate but to set in motion the process whereby the image of her husband will become a fixed star in the public gaze. To this end, an unnamed journalist (Billy Crudup) is summoned to the house and granted the privilege of an interview. Mrs. Kennedy, conscious of compiling the first draft of history, has copy approval, and one of the more abrasive touches of the film is the manner in which she halts her narration of events to apply a touch of whitewash. After an impolitic disclosure, she adds, “Don’t think for one second I’m going to let you print that.” Like many mourners, she stokes herself on cigarettes, but, when the reporter boldly suggests that he refer to her habit in print, she answers, “I don’t smoke.”
Pablo Larraín’s movie, with its keening score by Mica Levi, is a dance to the music of grief. Swiftly and nervously, as if obeying the beat of Jackie’s memory, we step back and forth in time. Back to Jackie, resplendent in eau de nil, with the proud President (Caspar Phillipson, who has the Kennedy eyes) at her side, listening to Pablo Casals; back to a flawless reconstruction of the televised White House tour that she offered to eighty million viewers, in 1962; forth to the fateful day in Dallas, to the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson (John Carroll Lynch) on Air Force One, and to Jackie’s flailing attempt to interrupt the autopsy at the hospital. “I want him to look like himself,” she cries, in the most pitiful of pleas. Then comes the agony of arranging the funeral procession, with Robert Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jack Valenti (Max Casella) poised to be consulted or overruled. (Also of service is the painter, fixer, and all-round Kennedy confidant William Walton, stylishly played by Richard E. Grant and deserving a film of his own.) Other glimpses abound, some unnervingly intimate—a solitary Jackie, swooping through grand and empty rooms, in a waltz of despair, or reaching for the bottle and taking a consolatory swig.
What is the source for this sad spectacle? The script is credited solely to Noah Oppenheim, but behind it you feel the weight of earlier investigations. The reporter is based on Theodore H. White, who wrote of his meeting with Jackie for Life. More recently, we have her conversations with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recorded in 1964 and released in 2011, and Barbara Leaming’s 2014 biography, which proposed that Mrs. Kennedy fell prey to post-traumatic stress disorder after her husband’s demise. Leaming describes her as “self-medicating with vodka, tyrannized by flashbacks and nightmares,” and that is precisely the regimen that Larraín’s film reveals.
I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, “Jackie” delivers a gratifying thrill. It is timely, too, tapping into our fathomless obsession with First Ladies. No wonder Portman is in such inexorable form. Watchful and tremulous, she captures to perfection the breathiness of Jackie’s voice, as it floats above the guttural twang of less exalted lives—“Amairca,” she says, smoothing her native land into trisyllabic gentility. But Portman’s beauty is sharper and foxier than that of the woman she portrays, whose broad features were designed, whether by God or by good breeding, to give almost nothing away. Mystery and myth became her, and the film is right to show Jackie feeding thoughts of Camelot to her tame journalist. (In truth, when White passed on this hint his editors at Life rebuffed it as schmalz; only when Mrs. Kennedy insisted did it stay in the published interview.) It is telling that “Jackie” should conclude, over the end credits, with Richard Burton’s croaking of the title song from Lerner and Loewe’s Arthurian musical, of which President Kennedy—so his widow claimed—was fond. After stripping off the veils of a legend, “Jackie” succumbs, at the last, and devotedly puts them back on.
Rarely have I seen a movie star look tenser or more unhappy than Brad Pitt does in “Allied.” You could say that he’s meant to be tense; after all, his role is that of Max Vatan, a Canadian airman working for British intelligence who is parachuted into Morocco, in 1942. His duties are manifold. Not only must he kill the German Ambassador, team up with a fellow-assassin, Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard), and pretend to be her husband in the leadup to the hit. Far, far worse than that, he has to speak French. Fluently. What triggers the panic in his eyes, le pauvre garçon, is not a night club teeming with Nazis but the soft and deadly approach of an irregular verb.
Back in London, once the operation is over, Max and Marianne fall in love, as if the make-believe had consumed them. (Speaking of her spying, Marianne says, “I keep the emotions real. That’s why it works.”) They marry properly and have a child, born during an air raid. All is fair in love and war, until Max learns that his wife is suspected of being a double agent, working for the Germans. (This, and more, is in the trailer.) He denies the charge, and sets out to disprove it—again, ample reason for his air of desperate vexation. But here’s the thing: that air hangs around, from beginning to end, and it almost snuffs out the movie. Over the years, we have seen Pitt in many soul-testing experiences: he had to act crazy, in “12 Monkeys” (1995), and take up arms against a sea of zombies, in “World War Z” (2013). All he is required to do for “Allied” is choose between a tuxedo for homicide, pale summer suits for a hot climate, and a dashing Air Force uniform for rainy England, yet even his handsomeness fails to carry the day. If anything, he looks a little puffy and scared, as if Angelina Jolie were hiding around the corner of the set, with full Maleficent makeup and sharpened claws, preparing to pounce. That would explain a lot.
“Allied” is written by Steven Knight and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does. True, there is plenty of repartee between Marianne and Max, some of it flirtatious, some of it concerned with the tools of their merciless trade. Machine guns, for instance: “You’ll be O.K. with the Sten on the night, right?” “I’ll be O.K. if I have to use cutlery.” Half the time, however, thanks to a strange slackness in the editing, the couple pause so long before replying to each other that any charge between them, suspenseful or erotic, is squandered. Though face to face, they sound like two people talking down a long-distance phone line. Max might as well have stayed in London and sent telegrams.
None of this reflects badly on Cotillard, who remains as hard to decode as the plot demands; a great film about treachery might yet be made with her feline skills at its heart. There is strength, too, in the supporting cast, especially in Jared Harris, who is both peppery and sympathetic—and armed with the requisite mustache—as Max’s British superior. He seems harrowed at the climax, as if lamenting a twist that never happened, and puzzled by the glumness of the whole affair. Join the club, old chap.
What we are left with, in “Allied,” is an overwhelming sense of the secondhand. You cannot show your hero and heroine strolling to a café table in wartime Casablanca and not expect your viewers to murmur, “Been there. Seen that.”(The very shape of Cotillard’s hat is tipped toward Ingrid Bergman’s.) At one point, Max even tells Marianne, seated at a piano, to play the “Marseillaise.” Hey, that’s Victor Laszlo’s line! As for the scene in which Cotillard and Pitt, garbed in white linen, get to expand their relationship in the front seat of a car, while a desert storm caterwauls around them, I kept waiting for the camera to pan across to the next vehicle, where Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas were last seen doing the same in “The English Patient.” There must be a designated parking lot for sandy lovers. My fear, in short, is that Zemeckis may have stumbled into a patch of cinema so well trodden that it has simply gone to seed. As time goes by, will all the love stories in all the world run dry? ♦
