Jackie (2016)

This film is exquisite. Natalie Portman is a revelation.
She becomes Jackie, turning her image into a living, breathing human being, truly embodying the woman behind the myth.
The film is framed around an interview between the newly widowed Jackie (Natalie Portman) and renowned journalist (Billy Crudrup), who is never given a name. She has control over the interview and whatever she doesn't want him to write down in his article, he will strike it from the record. She details her nationally broadcast tour of the White House, her secret love of history and then the assassination and its immediate aftermath.
Jackie, despite her grief, has to arrange and prepare the funeral and then begin packing so she can leave the White House, as it no longer belongs to her. The Johnsons (John Carroll Lynch and Beth Grant) are in charge now, though she gives them all the credit in the world for being so understanding.
She wants her husband to be remembered so she arranges an elaborate funeral, eerily similar to Abraham Lincoln's nearly one hundred years previously. She will march the eight city blocks accompanying the body between locations despite many being against that decision, for safety reasons.
Though she claims she does this so her husband won't be forgotten, it is actually so she won't be. She longs to be remembered, even though she never wanted or craved fame; she just married a Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson). But when she finds out that her brother-in-law, Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard) kept Lee Harvey Oswald's own murder from her, she turns livid, as she and her children were out in board daylight. Jackie is a real person, full of contradictory statements and actions, struggling to get by, just like the rest of us. The journalist wants to mention her lighting another cigarette, but she squashes that brilliant line with telling him that she doesn't smoke.
While the plot may have been more or less done before, the director, Pablo Larrain, paints it beautifully, putting a new spin on a family that has been portrayed countless times. The atmosphere truly takes you back to 1963, with the costumes pitch perfect and the set design is breathtaking. Even the camera work is something to behold.
The scene where Jackie wipes the blood off her face just before Lyndon Johnson takes his oath to be president, crying the whole time is one of the best acting scenes in cine-graphic history. The other actors are great, including Greta Gerwig as Jackie's secretary and personal assistant, Nancy. And while the film may not tell you much or shatter your opinion of Jackie, it makes her a real person, where the history lessons have left off, and that alone is incredible. Grade: A-