It’s easy to forget, in a historical event like the assassination of JFK, an event that echoes through our politics even now, that a President is as much a person as he or she is a symbol. Presidents have people who love them, people who mourn them, and in the first trailer for Jackie, we get to see Natalie Portman’s take on that personal side of Jackie Kennedy.
The movie follows Jackie, later Jackie Onassis, during her time as First Lady and following the assassination, framed around Theodore White’s Camelot Revisited, a lengthy interview with her, to the point of quoting the piece in the trailer’s dialogue. It was a necessary followup to White’s The Making Of The President, a Pulitzer Prize winning book on how elections were run and where, potentially, they went wrong.
But the focus is on Jackie, and Portman’s performance. One attention-getting aspect is how carefully recreated the historical events are, not just JFK’s assassination and funeral, but some of the press and publicity surrounding the JFK administration before the tragedy. It’ll be interesting to see how Jackie’s internal life was depicted, as she largely withdrew from the public after the assassination. We’ll see just what they theorized she was thinking December 2nd.
(via YouTube)
