My best cinephile friend was in town pre-Oscars, and we wanted to do a little double feature. So after sitting in a theater for 30 minutes taking in all of the emotions from Moonlight, Jackie kicked off.

I went into this pretty blind, and in hindsight, what a strange concept. I had done no research, and just knew it was a Natalie Portman lead “biopic” of sorts. Only once the movie started did I realize this was produced by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream/Black Swan), and I immediately tempered my expectation from “Classic Jackie O Retrospective” to “Dark Post-Assassination Character Study”.

Portman had the mannerisms and accent down pat, locking down another nomination for Nat. And I always love to see Billy Crudup in anything (since he is a golden god). As for the way the movie unfolds, I found the post assassination flight and cleanup jarringly beautiful. Watching such a notoriously put together woman struggle through picking up the pieces of her life, and making what seems to be all the wrong decisions, really humanized what could have been a purely robotic character.

One thing that I was not as enamored with as much as others, was the score. I found it a little heavy handed and leading, and at many points I found myself inundated with a combo of brash instrumentals and brain matter that came across as a little too unsettling to me. But it was disturbing, and that is often Aronofsky’s aesthetic. 7.0/10