Natalie Portman‘s Jackie Kennedy dialogue is mostly discernible in this clip, but try listening to it in a big echo-y theatre (as I’ve done in screenings in Toronto and Santa Barbara). It’s a struggle. And yet every vowel and syllable that Billy Crudup (who plays historian Theodore H. White) speaks in this clip is perfectly crisp and clear. The fact is that a bassy baritone fortified by clean diction is easier to understand than the voice of a breathy female (Matt Zoller Seitz has described her speech as “a researched, considered, Marilyn Monroe-breathy impersonation”) mitigated by an upper-crust Rhode Island accent. I’m sorry but there’s a difference.
