"jackie"

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Natalie Portman has dazzled and delighted audiences world-wide over the course of her long and illustrious career. Whether you adored her as a prepubescent hit-girl in Luc Besson's "Léon: The Professional," a quirky ball-busting epileptic in Zach Braff's "Garden State," or supernatural Oscar-baiting ballerina in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan," Portman has never seemed quite so comfortable in her own skin as an actress and performer. But just as so many great child actors and actresses finally come into their own after embarking on a handful of fruitful artistic partnerships (think Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, or Ryan Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn), Portman inhabits her most fully-realized role here yet, and with Aronofsky in the producer's chair, the duo have struck gold once again. 

It's apparent Chilean director Pablo Larraín didn't set out to make a typical biopic hamstrung by patriotism or reverence, bypassing the traditional movie constraints of biographical ebullition (think "Hidden Figures," "The King's Speech," or "Patriot's Day") in favor of vivid rawness and distress. With "Jackie," we are not just meant to bear witness to the gruesome assassination of JFK, but to grieve alongside a wife, mother and former First Lady grappling with the event's debilitating aftermath — spiraling in and out of fear, isolation, loneliness, desperation, and crippling malaise, subcutaneously coaxing her (slow) descent into madness while keeping it at arm's length. Retaining utmost poise whilst suffering the ultimate indignity proves to be a powerful if not impossible tightrope act for Jackie, and Noah Oppenheimer's brisk, 92-page script artfully depicts her incomprehension of the world as she sifts back and forth between the high-highs of her days in the White House, to the low-lows of preparing her late husband's funeral.

Yet it is Mica Levi's augural score which provides the only respite from this untenable sadness, and it is also the film's sweeping, secret weapon. At times melancholic, numbing, and even dizzying, every note we hear reassures us that there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel for Jackie. Levi's perfunctory compositions, gyrating between the serene and nauseating, personifies Jackie's own sad slog to victory — a journey which requires her to stand up to powerful megalomaniacs, including LBJ and her brother-in-law, Bobby, men who believe a woman should be seen and not heard, protected but not cared for. As Jackie anesthetizes herself during the film's final half hour with wine, pills and Richard Burton's regal warbling of "Camelot," the feeling is so familiar and surreal it barely resembles fiction. Yet for anyone who has ever unexpectedly or tragically lost a loved one, this sequence will almost certainly leave a lump in your throat. 

In Larrain's final (and not-so-subtle) desire to divorce the 'Americana' from America, he takes one final dig at our lavish, aristocratic institutions in the film's last moments: A TIME reporter jokingly asks Jackie if she has any advice for him, and she wryly responds, "Yes, don't marry the President."  

"JACKIE" Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.