Review of Jackie

A longish film about the JFK assassination and its aftermath, including the background conflicts about the funeral, from the perspective of Kennedy's wife Jacqueline Bouvier.

The most notable thing about this (everybody knows, or thinks they know, about the assassination itself) is the non-linear structure of the narrative. The film darts about between the assassination, the immediate aftermath, a later interview that Jackie gives to a carefully selected and briefed journalist, the earlier episode in which she had welcomed TV cameras into the White House and another in which Pablo Casals performs for the President and his entourage. And yet it's never confusing, even though there is no heavy-handed signalling as to where these segments fit together temporally. Is that because it's particularly well done, or have we all just got very good at reading this sort of thing?

I thought it conveyed very well the ambivalence and ambiguity about Jackie's response to the death of JFK - it managed to show both her vulnerability/fragility and the extent to which she and other members of the family (especially Bobby) were thinking strategically about how the funeral would create JFK's legacy.

BTW I knew that Jackie subsequently married Aristotle Onassis, but I didn't know that she did a proper job as a book editor for the twenty years after the assassination.

Watched on our new clever TV via entirely legitimate Amazon Video.