Natalie Portman 'Jackie,' Poised to Win a Second Best Actress Award
Natalie Portman is poised to win a best actress award if her new movie 'Jackie' gets a 2016 release according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The brilliant actress, who won in the category six years ago for her excellently portrayal of a mentally unstable ballerina in 'Black Swan,' showed once again her acting chops as she played the enigmatic wife of the 35th president of the United States in "Jackie."
The Hollywood Reporter said that this year's best actress Oscar race has already an impressive lineup and Natalie Portman's jaw-dropping portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy will make the best actress category a tight race.
In the film Portman, spends her time in grand rooms by herself, subliminally conveying the loneliness Jackie felt even before her husband's death, and felt more than ever in the days after it, when she had to comfort two young children, plan a proper funeral, vacate her home and figure out her own identity without him - all in the public eye, the Hollywoo Reporter said.
Portman gives life to her character's delicate, porcelain features, to be sure, but she had to work for - and nails - the regal poise, purring voice, proper accent, dazed look and frosty demeanor of the public Mrs. Kennedy.
The Hollywood Reporter opines that the Star Wars and Thor actress also creates a fascinating portrait of what the real woman might have been like when she was away from the cameras and at her most vulnerable, confiding in her trusted friend Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), bickering with Bobby Kennedy (a miscast Peter Sarsgaard) and Jack Valenti (Max Casella), pondering life's meaning with a priest (John Hurt) and trying to shape her husband's legacy during her on-the-record/off-the-record exchanges with the journalist in Hyannis.
Many recent films and TV programs have dealt with the Kennedy assassination and/or its aftermath, from Peter Landesman's 2013 film Parkland to Bryan Cranston's 2014 Tony winner turned 2016 Emmy nominee All the Way to Amazon's 2016 limited series 11/22/63 to another film here at this year's TIFF, Rob Reiner's LBJ.
Therefore, some of the scenes in Jackie may feel somewhat familiar. But never have they been done as well as they are in Jackie, which is distinguished beyond Portman's tour de force work by its cinematography, costumes, production design, score, makeup and hairstyling, which are all top-notch and also will enter Oscar contention when, not if, the film finds a distributor.
The film shows Jackie jumps around in time, covering, in no particular order, its protagonist's first solo exposure to the public on the Feb. 14, 1962, TV special "A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy"; the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy; the days of personal and national mourning thereafter; and a closed-door interview she granted a journalist (Billy Crudup, playing a guy based on The Making of a President author Theodore White) at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis a week after her husband's death, from which came the "Camelot" myth.