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Life can be hard and cruel and sometimes shattering, but few have ever had to cope with the kind of mind-numbing horror that slapped Jackie Kennedy across the chops on 11.22.63. And then she had to carry the weight for everyone, the weight of that whole terrible four-day pageant, and somehow the after-vibes have never quite gone away, even with the passing of 53 years. Ask anyone who was over the age of ten back then (i.e., boomers who are now over 60) and they’ll tell you all about that day, that pall, that weekend, that ache-athon that was broadcast morning, noon and night for over 80 hours straight.
It was therefore brilliant and kind of brash for Pablo Larrain to avoid the usual-usual in the making of Jackie — to sidestep that mass memory and not deliver a rote recap of what Mrs. Kennedy, only 34 at the time, went through that weekend, but to make a kind of art film — to give her portrait a kind of anxious, fevered, interior feeling. And yet it’s a saga of strength and steel — a woman who held it together and led a nation.
Larrain called for a rewrite of Noah Oppenheim‘s original 2010 script, cutting out many if not most of the well-known figures who had speaking parts and pruning Jackie down to what it is now — intimate, half-dreamlike, cerebral, not entirely “realistic” but at the same time persuasive and fascinating.