Director: Pablo Larraín
Jackie is an unusual biopic in that it is about the constructed historical legacy of someone other than the film’s subject. In the wake of her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) must make arrangements for a funeral that will cement his legacy among the greatest presidents—her motivations for doing so are left intentionally vague, arising out of a sense of duty and adherence to structure and finally developing into something perhaps more complex. The film makes an interesting double feature with Neruda, Pablo Larraín’s other major release last year, in that each film concerns itself with public image and not necessarily truth Larraín’s relationship with the truth seems both cynical and honest—that is, does truth lie in a tangible reality, or is it constructed from memory and the necessity of creating a personal narrative out of chaos? If Neruda was almost mythical in scope, Jackie is conversely hermetic, mostly staying close to Jackie. The major plot developments involve her coping processes more than they do exterior forces. Jackie’s ever-changing strategies for the funeral and Portman’s tightly-wound, nervous performance give the film’s dealings with grief a terrific rawness, and Mica Levi’s unorthodox score accents the sense of emotional disorder that follows in the wake of horrifying trauma.
Director: Pablo Larraín
With his third feature film, director Pablo Larraín continues to mine the travesties of Chilean fascist history, this time through a surreal, seriocomic tone that plays as a game of cat-and-mouse between the famous communist senator/poet (played by Luis Gnecco) and a detective on his trail (Gael Garcia Bernal). The way the relationship between the men unfolds suggests both Neruda’s own pretense and how the lunacy of the country’s politics helped inform the worldview of the poet. Larraín and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong bring a unique color palette of cool sepia tones (much of the early goings are given a saturated purple hue), furthering a sense of unreality—the film is not so much a biopic about Neruda as a filmed account of how Neruda might have seen this period of his life. The questions of reality in the latter half of the film elevate the picture significantly, recontextualizing both the political drama and Neruda himself with a narrative fracturing. The film would argue that the biopic form cannot capture history on its own, but requires a level of invention to get at an elusive mystical truth about what a person and place felt like.
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