Director Pablo Larraín Builds A Better Biopic With The Poetic, Kaleidoscopic 'Jackie'

JACKIE

Do you hate biopics? I sure do. Gladly, Pablo Larraín hates biopics, too. The Chilean director is all over Oscar season —the home of biopics— this year, because he’s gone and made two of them: Neruda, his cine-philosophical portrait of the final days of Chilean poet laureate Pablo Neruda, and, now, Jackie, an eerie evocation of the US First Lady reeling in the wake of her husband’s assassination. But, though they’re biographical stories of historical figures, each essentially repudiates every cliché of the genre; feeling like a victory for cinema.

Neither portrays a life, merely days in it. And, each uses the celebrity currency of its figure to capture liminal historical moments, times of unrest and political chaos. It’s a theme Larraín first explored in his 2010 masterpiece Post Mortem, in which a feckless mortuary worker (Larraín muse Alfredo Castro) is inundated with bodies at the epoch of the Pinochet 1973 military coup. Working with weighty symbols, Larraín shot that film with static compositions, in which his hard-edged, wide-screen frames feel like prisons. Jackie, too, has an oft-formal approach, and features many careful, stilled compositions. But, there’s a sense of constant motion throughout; the story less ‘told’ than sung, Larraín employing a lyrical, free-associative approach that pirouettes through time.

Here, in 1963, a grieving Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) sits down to give an interview to a Life magazine reporter (Billy Crudup). But she’s also, in 1962, taking a CBS film crew on a tour of the White House; and, talking to a priest (John Hurt) on the morning of a funeral. In the past, we see her presented as the world took her: a Minnie Mouse-voiced debutante, all big hair and hemlines, thrilled with the womanly task of interior decorating. But, in the two scenes following her husband’s death, we find someone changed: hard, sharply spoken, defiant, angry; aware, with Crudup, of the shaping of narratives, and horrified, with Hurt, by the cold comforts of remaining faithful in the face of loss. In the impressionist assembly of these varied moods, we get the impression of someone always performing: a public figure learning to play a grand, royal pantomime.

It’s in these sequences that Larraín shines, where the film descends into a sustained nightmare of shock, chaos, trauma.

These three conversations are less framing narratives than thematic pillars, in which the film’s themes —the fashioning of populist myth, the procedural rituals of death, crises of faith— are discussed aloud. Around them are scattered memories of the past; and through them dances the forward narrative thrust: the assassination, the plans for the funeral, the procession. Though, gladly enough, even the forward narrative isn’t told with chronological linearity.

It’s in these sequences that Larraín shines, where the film descends into a sustained nightmare of shock, chaos, trauma, broken only for banal conversations about funereal logistics.“What did the bullet sound like?” Crudup asks, and then, suddenly, the past is alive, and disorienting; a whirl back-and-forth that takes flight with one of recent cinema’s greatest single shots. Before we’ve seen the assassination, we’re fleeing from it: an open-top car tearing down a hot Texan expressway, besuited CIA agent crouching on the back like a super-hero. The camera, at first, tails the car, but then it cranes up, above, and we see who’s in the backseat: our heroine, in that iconic pink pillbox hat and suit, with the corpse of her husband laying in her lap.

From there, Larraín —and editor Sebastián Sepúlveda, who worked with him on the paedophile-priest black-comedy The Club, and who’s intimately involved with Jackie’s impressionist approach— smash-cuts to another instantly iconic cinematic image: Portman sobbing, blood-splattered, in the mirror of Air Force One’s bathroom. Later, we see her wandering, still in the pink suit, dowsed in bloodstains like a Tarantino goon, through the White House; horror having found its way into the life of a princess, the opulent palace forever stained.

And then come more memorable images: eye-of-God overheads of the military formations of a funeral procession; Portman in a motorcade, behind dark glass, the gathered crowds dancing in a dreamy reflection over her front; she and Peter Sarsgaard, the film’s Bobby Kennedy, riding in the distant, dark back of a hearse, flag-draped coffin between them, highway rolling out in the tiny window behind.

The film is shot —by Jacques Audiard’s DOP, Stéphane Fontaine— on 16mm, with a rough, grainy look that situates it in the time. But there’s no single visual approach; the celluloid made to look both hot, thick, saturated (in the Dallas sequences) and cold, wan, damp (in the interview scenes). They also recreate the 1962 TV program by using the old proto-video tube camera that Larraín employed on 2012’s No, his crowd-pleasing, VHS-nostalgic portrait of the 1988 Chilean plebiscite. Larraín’s ability to summon the past through format is at play in Jackie, but it’s never so singular a style-piece.

Instead, Jackie feels freewheeling, delirious, kaleidoscopic; the biopic not just loosed from starched form, but the shackles of narrative. Over-determined connections between public persona and imagined private lives are left for the birds; instead, through all the visual pirouettes and dances through time, we stick by the main subject’s side, invited only to feel empathy, not employ cod psychology. It’s the biopic turned phenomonological cinematic experience, an unknowable icon held close, but remaining distant. It’s history as poetry, alive for interpretation, and fluid for the telling.

LION

Lion is a film about a man searching for his elusive past; trying to grab onto something tangible in the distant recesses of foggy childhood memories. It’s based on the memoir of Saroo Brierley, an Indian-Australian who was adopted by parents in Tasmania as an orphan from the streets of Calcutta. But, in truth, he had only become separated from his family, and was lost, a five-year-old thrown into a tumult he couldn’t comprehend; his birth mother and brother, still out there, somewhere, looking for him. Using Google Earth, Brierley painstankingly clawed his way over maps of India, in search of his past. Cue: heartwarming homecoming finale; and, in the new cliché of the genre, the mini-documentary under the closing credits.

It sounds like the kind of based-on-a-true story tale that’s a generic awards-show contender, but screenwriter Luke Davies makes an inspired choice in adapting such inspirational material, wisely using the power afforded to drama. Lion is posed —and, in the book, written— as a story of a grown man searching for a forgotten past, but Davies doesn’t use the modern-day as an entry point. Instead, he begins at the beginning; bringing the past beautifully to life, so that the audience, too, will feel an emotional pull.

It’s an amazing opening, simple and raw … [But] when the film moves forward a couple of decades, it loses the shock, the energy, of the earliest sequences.

This means that the entire first half of Lion is handed over to a five-year-old lead; the Dickensian trials of an impish boy turned woebegone urchin. Hailing from a mountain village, he yearns to work like his older brother, to help his impoverished family. This leads him to riding the trains at night; and simple, horrifying mix-up imprisons the pint-sized protagonist in a decommissioned train that travels thousands of miles overland, dumping the young Saroo in a distant city where they speak a foreign tongue, where the streets are already overrun with orphans.

Evoking his cultural alienation, director Garth Davis —a feature-film debutante last seen directing Top Of The Lake— tells this first half, largely, through imagery; employing the same unwavering socio-realism and slow-mounting oppression of the Dardenne brothers, where humans fallen through society’s cracks must scrap like animals. It’s an amazing opening, simple and raw, told minus grandstanding. When the film moves forward a couple of decades, it loses the shock, the energy, of the earliest sequences. But the muddying of the drama, the loss of the forward thrust, mirrors the increasing emotional complexity: the conflicted feelings of the adopted person and the adoptive parents; the way the simplicity of a child’s worldview pulls away to an adult place of self-awareness, sadness, resignation, resentments.

As the grown-up Saroo, Dev Patel legit nails an Australian accent; Nicole Kidman, as his adoptive mother, wears a procession of varying wigs and a look of slow, wearied defeat; and Rooney Mara shows up as a love-interest who both stands by her man and refuses to cater to his pissy, preoccupied, argumentative ways. Directorially, Davis plays with the currency of memory, the way the hauntings of the past can come back with a rush (here, a jelabi is a Proustian madeleine), stitching past and present together artfully. In many of the movie’s key moments, he and editor Alexandre de Franceschi artfully cross-cut; as when eye-of-God overheads evoke the omniscient views of Google Earth, or when satellite-image pixels give way to vivid childhood memories of walked streets. It’s tearjerker material made artful, Lion a profund story told with actual profundity.

COLLATERAL BEAUTY

Just as cinemas are filling up with Oscar-season contenders, there’s also a steady parade of their shadow doubles: failed Oscarbait. And, boy, is Collateral Beauty a failure. It harkens back to the dark days of the ’00s, when any film with a disparate ensemble cast and a contrived secret uniting them would end up all over awards-shows (see: Paul Haggis’s Crash, the nadir of the motion picture). Its tagline is literally ‘we are all connected’, the film so uninspired it merely rolls out the eye-roll-worthy theme of that entire loathsome sub-genre wholesale.

It’s a painfully earnest, utterly-hokey Will Smith vehicle that’s reminiscent of another painfully earnest, utterly-hokey Will Smith vehicle: 2008’s Seven Pounds. Again, it’s another tale of tragedy and atonement, with Smith a man mired in grief. Screenwriter Allan Loeb and director David Frankel nakedly, shamelessly exploit the cheapest emotional tool in the box —a dead child!— wielding it like a cudgel. Collateral Beauty poses as a film about grieving, but really it’s something more repulsive: its title evoking that new-age trope of needing to put a positive spin on everything; even death, loss, trauma.

The A-list cast all do various degrees of slumming.

On this gross emotional framework, Loeb erects a silly, Capra-esque device, in which the A-list cast all do various degrees of slumming. Smith’s business associates —Michael Peña, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet— recruit three actors —Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore— to play Death, Love, and Time incarnate. The goal is to convince Smith he’s crazy, and not fit for work, but really the whole lark makes everyone examine their lives. Peña secretly has cancer, so he learns he should tell his wife rather than nobly suffer. Norton is a divorced deadbeat dad, so he gets a Knightboat love-interest and wins back his angry daughter’s affection. Winslet, a middle-aged career woman, is of course scouring online sperm-bank catalogues because she’s single and childless (the shame!); I forget what lesson Time teaches her, but it’s pat, reductive, corny.

Ultimately, what comes at the end sinks even lower than what’s come before; as the film harbours not one, but two essentially illogical twists. The first is heavily telegraphed and unbearably cheesy; one of those third-act reveals that’s supposed to be inspiring, but instead is embarrassing, concerning Smith’s cautious, budding relationship with Naomie Harris’s suspiciously accommodating grief counsellor. The second is so deeply stupid, ridiculous, nonsensical, and nauseating that no one could see it coming. It means that, ultimately, Collateral Beauty only succeeds in summoning irony: it desperately wants your tears, but all you can do is laugh.