The first things we see and hear in Pablo Larrain’s excellent biopic on Jackie Kennedy, Jackie, seem to contradict each other. The film starts out in darkness and over said darkness plays a spine tingling chord, the first of Mica Levi’s (of Under the Skin) earth-shattering score. It’s the type of thing that you might see in a horror film in the darkness of the screen, and the screeching quality of the chords. But then we see the actual woman appear, rosy-cheeked, and against the beautiful view of a beautiful sunset. Jackie vaguely smiles as she walks vindictively, her back against the blood red sky. She’s leaving that part of her life now. It’s time to say goodbye. This is a fascinating moment that builds the expectations for the film ahead of us. Jackie is a film made of contradictions, a film made of the whirlwind of emotions of its central character and while the opening scene demonstrates this easily, structurally, the film needs to embody these emotions and it does so through the fragmented nature of its structure in both its scenes and overall narrative push. The next image that we see following the opening takes place on the day that Jackie will be interviewed by a reporter played by Billy Crudup. Chronologically, this is the last thing that happens, and yet we see it first. The Jackie in these scenes seems to be the real woman, bullheaded, but charmingly so. A woman of immense power both politically and in character. This opening allows us to contextualize her as just that. It allows us to see the power that this woman is capable of before both structurally and character wise, the film strips her character down in front of us. The structure of the film is nonlinear, but it is all focussed on the same character. While long segments of the film may be taking place in chronological order, the way that the pieces overall fit together is quite scrambled, but there is a narrative purpose to doing this. Jackie is effectively a character of contradictions. The drama of the film is often based on her hopscotching between burying her husband in peace, or creating a fanfare out of it, and if so, whether or not that fanfare was truly deserved. Her own emotional range is fragmented and constantly changed by the events that are happening around her and even deeper the ideas that fuel those events. By presenting the audience with a confused and fragmented framework, the film itself takes on the confused and fragmented emotions of its titular character. In practice, while the narrative segmentation works to reinforce the ideas behind how the people have interpreted Jackie’s actions, it is still based in nonlinear storytelling which can be juxtaposed with the shifting emotions of the central character. Each cut back to the interview is informed by an important emotional moment: laying in bed after the assassination. By continuing a flurry of scenes that are out of order, the film simultaneously disorients, yet informs us. We see the truth of the matter, even have it bluntly explained to us, but we are shown such truth through a pattern of scenes that confuse, much like Jackie, receiving reality but through an utterly confused lens. This doesn’t just extend to the overall narrative structure of the film but also happens during individual sequences. Moments that easily accentuate this fragmentation in scenes are found everywhere throughout the opening act of the film. In the aftermath of the death of JFK, the camera almost never leaves Jackie’s side putting the audience in her face and hard cutting consistently to disorient us. Each new frame, each new minute of footage has narrative importance, but each seems cut short, nothing ever gives a hint of satisfaction in the length of the scenes, nothing ever gives a resolution. They jump cut to the next one instead. Jump cuts usually travel across a short amount of time, and while these do, they play much more like disorienting jolts within the same continuous shot. The camera itself prepares us for unbroken takes as well with handheld work resembling the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, but Larrain and his editors still cut, breaking the individual moments into small pieces that Jackie herself and the audience are left to interpret emotionally. Jackie is in one way a horror film. It is a film about the horrifying emotions that can consume us after the death of a loved one and what better way of portraying that does the director have than creating a structure that is just as fragmented as the woman at the center. Bibliography 1. Jackie. Dir. Pablo Larrain. Perf. Natalie Portman. 2016. DVD.
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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