Despite what the IMDB and Wikipedia say about Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie being a 2017 release, I’m going on the presumption that it’ll be pretty much done six or seven months hence (August/September) and acquired by Fox Searchlight for release during the 2016 award season, or certainly by November/December. It’s obviously an Oscar-baity thing, and it wouldn’t make much sense to hold it for a full year (i.e., until the fall of ’17). If Pablo doesn’t get the CG just right and make his footage blend perfectly with color newsreels of JFK’s funeral, Jackie won’t work. Here’s hoping.
Here’s part of what I wrote about Noah Oppenheim‘s script on 4.15.10:
“Jackie follows the former Mrs. Kennedy’s experience from the day of JFK’s assassination in Dallas on 11.22.63 to his burial in Arlington Cemetery three days hence. I’ve read enough about those four dark days to understand that Oppenheim’s script is basically a tasteful re-capturing of what happened, and that’s all. It’s an elegant, almost under-written thing — straight, clean, dignified. The dialogue seems genuine — trustable — in that it’s not hard to believe that Jackie or Bobby Kennedy or Larry O’Brien or Theodore H. White or Jack Valenti might have said these very lines in actuality.
“The portrait that emerges isn’t what anyone would call judgmental or intrusive, or even exploratory. Jackie Kennedy is depicted as pretty much the same, reserved, quietly classy woman of legend, determined to honor her husband’s memory by making decisions about aspects of his state funeral in her own way, according to what she feels he would have wanted, or what would be appropriately dignified.
“I don’t mean to sound like a smart-ass, but it’s more or less in the same wheelhouse as Roger Donaldson‘s Thirteen Days, the drama about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I had a feeling that while writing this Oppenheim was mindful of the screenplay style of Aaron Sorkin, and how the latter has almost authored a ‘how to’ manual about writing emotionally reserved but affecting stories about people who live and work in the White House. The difference is that this time they’re well-known figures and the dialogue is based on historical accounts.
“Jackie fits the template of a ‘let’s re-tell history again’ type of thing — familiar history re-lived and re-told with a veneer of class.”
