Within the biscuit-coloured swathes of an expensive Manhattan hotel suite, Natalie Portman shifts side to side on a sofa, hefting her pregnant body into a cross-legged pose. She is dressed in black dungarees over a crisp cream blouse, an outfit that seems both homely and practical, as well as a little severe and austere. It’s the opposite, really, of a gore-splattered pink Chanel suit.
In 1963, that suit made history when Jackie Kennedy refused to change out of it for photographs, insisting the public witness the fact that her husband, the 35th president of the United States, had just had his brains blown out beside her. Now that outfit is taking its place in movie history with Jackie, a fugue of a film set in the days following Kennedy’s assassination, as the first lady tries to wrest control of her husband’s legacy.
It sees Portman staggering through empty rooms in the White House, incandescent with grief, rage and disbelief, sporting the familiar bouffant bob that makes the rest of her seem tiny. Tremulous, ferocious, this is an all-out, old-fashioned performance of operatic magnitude and, yes, a little melodrama as well. The Academy should love it. If the 35-year-old actress wins, it will be her second Oscar; her first was for 2010’s Black Swan. Last week, she also picked up a best actress Bafta nomination for Jackie.
She seems quite unaffected by the prospect of an Oscar. When I venture that Jackie might be the biggest role of her career, she looks mildly surprised. “Oh thanks,” she mutters lightly. “I dunno, I can’t judge myself.”
When pressed, she will say that her greatest strength is her openness to failure. “I have done roles I have failed at — believe me, there are plenty of bad reviews out there.” Yet she seems to imply that there are more important things to think about than her performance. Such as a presidential crisis. Not the assassination of JFK, but the election of Donald Trump. In October, Portman stumped for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, beaming and waving, her baby bump big beneath a sugar-pink dress; yet she’s now sanguine about Trump’s win.
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“If we can look at a silver lining to this, I think it’s made a lot of us feel we have to engage more and be more active citizens. That’s got to be positive.”
Has it changed the way she thinks about her profession, about what purpose film might serve?
“I think film-making, and storytelling in general, is always inherently political, because you’re asking people to care about another human being for many hours of their life. And for films, it’s usually in a communal environment — it’s sitting together and caring about someone together — so it serves as a sort of practice of empathy.”
Jackie, she believes, meets these criteria: “It lets you into the heart and mind of a woman in a way you don’t often get to see on film.”
She spends much of it battling the many men who assume they can compromise her control. There’s a fabulous showdown, for example, with Jack Valenti, Lyndon B Johnson’s special assistant, when he naysays her wish to have a funeral procession and walk alongside her husband’s casket to the cathedral. She wins by wiles, rather than force or fury, a woman holding tight to her dignity while getting what she wants.
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In 2015, Portman made her directorial debut with A Tale of Love and Darkness, a warmly received adaptation of Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel about growing up in the early years of the State of Israel. In doing so, she joined the still disproportionately small ranks of female filmmakers. Recently, she spoke with exasperation about how many movies are made by straight white men.
“I don’t have a problem with that point of view,” she clarifies, “because it is a totally legitimate point of view — I’m glad to get insight into how straight white male minds work. It’s just that we’re not having other points of view. As a female audience member, it’s really hard for me to watch these movies where women don’t exist. There are so many movies where it’s literally 20 men and no female character, or there’s a female character who’s, like, the wife on the phone. I’m kind of not interested in watching it!” she laughs.
Portman, the only child of Shelley and Avner, a gynaecologist, was born Neta-Lee Hershlag in Jerusalem. When she was three, the family moved to America, and, not long after, the precocious Portman decided she was going to act. She was, she says, a very serious kid, or at least a kid pretending to be older than she was. This was evident, to discomfiting effect, in her debut film. She was 12 when she shot Léon, playing the precocious protégée of a grizzled hitman. It seems as though she’s been resisting playing objects of desire ever since.
“Yes!” she says. I begin to add, apologetically, that I don’t mean to reduce her performance to just that, but she cuts me off: “No, no — thank you — but no, that’s accurate, it is.”
One Oscar, two Golden Globes and 50 or so diverse movies later, here we are. Even when she played a stripper, in 2004’s Closer, she managed to convince its director, Mike Nichols, that they didn’t need the scene in which she actually performs a striptease. “It’s hard,” she says of this commitment to playing characters who want more than just to be wanted, “because desire is the language of cinema. And because it’s been so male-dominated, the story of cinema is male desire and a female object of desire.
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“I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, it’s just that we don’t have the counter, we don’t have the expression of female desire. We become the object of desire, not the subject of desire. Women have been made to feel guilty or bad for desiring food, or sex, or power.”
In Jackie, that power, bitterly won, is nothing less than the will to shape American history. “I really appreciate how Jackie Kennedy was conscious of her public self and how she cultivated a story — like deciding not to take off the bloody suit. She knew that image was part of the story, that it would have meaning for people, [even though] I’m sure she wanted nothing more than to take it off.” She was, Portman notes with admiration, “conscious of what the public needed, even when she was going through private turmoil”.
Portman is irresistibly acid in her scenes with the casually condescending reporter from Life magazine (Billy Crudup). At one point, she avers grandly, as if speaking directly to the annals of history: “There will never be another Camelot.” Yet in these last days of the first black presidency and the most popular first family in history, that declaration is debatable. Is it possible that we have just had another Camelot?
Portman’s eyes shine as she talks about Michelle Obama. “She’s just such an incredible woman. It almost makes you feel like, ‘Aw, man, what would she have been doing if she wasn’t stuck in the White House?’”
So what does Portman think of Obama’s successor, Melania Trump? Unblinking, she responds coolly: “I don’t really know anything about her, so we’ll see.”
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Much like first ladies, Oscar-winning actresses tend to be idolised, scrutinised, often demonised; they are made to mean too much. Portman resists the comparison. “I’m not sure I define my own responsibility in the same way, because I’m not a politician or a politician’s wife, I don’t represent something for a country, you know? So I feel a little bit more of a right to do whatever I need to do privately. I’m not sure the private side of someone’s life needs to be shared, because it doesn’t serve a purpose for the public. Whereas a president’s private life does — it’s part of the public’s history.”
Portman, who is expecting her second child with the dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, preserves her privacy carefully, yet last year experienced unwelcome attention for a feature in The New York Times T magazine, in which she and the writer Jonathan Safran Foer published specially written emails. The publication of this commissioned correspondence was meant to promote A Tale of Love and Darkness, but few people talked about the film. Instead, there was a blaze of snark and gossip.
New York magazine wrote of Foer’s contribution: “These emails are certainly the kinds of intense midnight musings — lengthy, pretentious digressions on Jewish melancholy and the nature of freedom — one might pen if one wanted to convince a very famous and beautiful actress to leave her husband for you.” It was a rumour that had started when Foer left his wife, the writer Nicole Krauss. Portman, with a weary sigh, says this is “all bull”.
She had no idea the feature would get so much attention. “I was bummed, because it felt like people were being judgmental over...” She attempts another tack. “The point, of course, was to help get people to see the film I directed, so when the attention turns to, uh, you know, judgment on who I am, who Jonathan is, it’s not pleasant. It wasn’t the intention.”
If you can disregard the surrounding ruckus, you’ll find her emails endearing. She has a nice little observation, for example, on “sad girl chic”, that funny cultural construct whereby “being deep or interesting or even attractive was being a little sullen”.
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“I didn’t realise how 1990s that is!” she chuckles. “It’s very Fiona Apple, Prozac Nation, that whole moment.”
“That whole moment” includes the idolising of Portman herself. It was around this time she added to her sad girl chic, or at least serious girl chic, by deciding to turn her back on Hollywood for Harvard, where she studied psychology. The Star Wars prequels had made her internationally famous and she memorably told a reporter, “I’d rather be smart than a movie star”, a line that makes her groan. “Argh, it doesn’t even make sense. You can be both!”
Well, obviously: she’s basically living proof. “Thank you, that’s very kind.” Then she adds drily, almost to herself: “Clearly not, because I said that.”
With quips like this, it seems particularly curious that her two greatest roles should be characterised by melodrama and madness. Portman the person — measured, reserved, calmly analytical — is so far from that. Perhaps the only way you can give yourself over to playing an obsessive ballerina descending into psychosis, or a grief-ravaged first lady seeking to steer history, is through the safety of having your head very firmly screwed on.
Jackie made Life print the legend
“I arrived... in the driving rain,” wrote the journalist Theodore H White, who interviewed Jackie Kennedy a week after her husband’s death — yet in the film’s take on the interview, the morning is clear. Also, the hack is portrayed as scruffy, turning up at Hyannis Port with his top shirt button undone, sweaty, ruffled. These are rare shuffles away from the truth for a biopic that sticks rigidly to its source material.
In reality, White — as establishment press types were in 1963 — was stately. Most photos show him in a suit and tie, and it is inconceivable that he would have turned up, as Billy Crudup’s character does, at any widow’s residence so disrespectfully, let alone one mourning the president.
That aside, the interview Jackie gave to Life magazine — the framing device for the movie — is truthfully told. She is shown annotating White’s notes and, as he later admitted, he was simply “her instrument in labelling the myth” — a put-up job after the assassination to steal American hearts.
She wanted to memorialise her husband in a big article, in a magazine that had published official photos of their wedding, children and pets, and reached 7m readers. She called for White, a puff-job insider, personally. The journalist was a Kennedy nut, having written The Making of the President, 1960 (part of his famous series). Crudup is sceptical and chippy. In real life, he surely brought her flowers.
The idea that the first lady was in total control, however, stems from White’s notes, released a year after her death. Available online from the John F Kennedy Library, they make fascinating reading, if you can work out her handwriting. (On page 5, she seems to ask for “emmental chips”, which is unlikely.) But no paragraphs of White’s go unembellished: his yellow legal pad paper is smudged with handprints, both hers and his. On page 3, she writes: “I’ve made him happy.”
The film ends with White on the phone in the Kennedy mansion at Hyannis Port, calling in his copy. The time is 2am, and his subject, of course, looks on. Copytaking wasn’t uncommon, but such a serious piece usually has time to settle and form. Dramatic licence? Not at all. Life was holding the presses at a cost of $30,000 an hour: this story wasn’t one to pass up. JD
Jackie opens on Friday