The legend of Camelot
“People like to believe in fairy tales. Don’t let it be forgot that for one brief, shining moment, there was a Camelot.”
The fact that the Kennedy clan was obsessed with power and that they carefully orchestrated everything to put John F. Kennedy in a good career-promoting light is no secret. Much was written about Joseph P. Kennedy’s ambitions, including the great careers he envisioned for his sons. Less well known is that Jackie Kennedy also played a strong part in the creation of her husband’s legend. Jackie was the one who turned the charming philanderer’s story, posthumously, into a Camelot.
The myth was born on 29 November 1963 on a stormy autumn evening, a week after JFK’s death. That night, Jacqueline Kennedy hosted the journalist Theodore White at Cape Cod. White wanted to write an article about the late president for Life magazine. But Jackie would’ve been no Kennedy if she hadn’t used this opportunity to dictate to White, in addition to her memories, the kind of image she had of her husband and his achievements – an image that still characterizes our perception of JFK today.
Pablo Larraín’s film Jackie now focuses on the creation of exactly this legend – and on the First Lady, who, in the days after the President’s death, between the assassination and the funeral, tried to memorialize her husband as best she could. In the short time span that the film investigates, Larraín shows a sequence of unapologetically beautiful images, so the sets and costumes alone make the film worthwhile for all Jackie fans.
Natalie Portman, although certainly the most elegant choice to play Jackie Kennedy, doesn’t appear to truly take on the role, despite her fitting looks. “How Natalie Portman interpreted the role could be considered capricious. The pronounced accent, the spread-out cigarette, the coquetry with which she savours Jackie’s answers before immediately taking them back. But all this is probably only the virtuosic expression of an almost postmodern understanding of truth with which Jackie adds itself to the circulating versions. The fractures in Portman’s performance of the figure of Jackie is exactly what gives this version authority – a performance that has so many levels of reflection that it almost seems natural in the end,” writes Bert Rebhandl in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about Portman.
No matter how much we judge Portman’s accomplishments in the film, director Pablo Larraín’s Jackie has added another glamorous version to the Kennedy story – and it certainly won’t be the last version.