Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016)

Natalie Portman and Billy Crudup in Jackie

Jackie Kennedy: Natalie Portman
Bobby Kennedy: Peter Sarsgaard
Nancy Tuckerman: Greta Gerwig
The Journalist: Billy Crudup
The Priest: John Hurt
Bill Walton: Richard E. Grant
John F. Kennedy: Caspar Phillipson
Lyndon B. Johnson: John Carroll Lynch
Lady Bird Johnson: Beth Grant
Jack Valenti: Max Casella

Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Jean Rabasse
Costume design: Madeline Fontaine
Music: Mica Levi

I will give the benefit of the doubt to director Pablo Larraín (born in Chile in 1976) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (born in 1978) and assume that they didn't know what a thudding sentimental cliché ending Jackie with a reprise of the title song from Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot would seem to those of us who actually lived through the Kennedy years and experienced the assassination and extended period of mourning that followed. Back then, you couldn't avoid Camelot allusions, even when we were fully aware of the shortcomings of JFK and the Cold War mentality, especially that of his "best and brightest" who were about to lead us into the Vietnam quagmire. Even as early as June 1964, reporter Tom Wicker was trying to evoke a less sentimental vision in his Esquire piece titled "Kennedy Without Tears." This absence of real historical context is a blemish on a well-meaning and sometimes very good film. The very good part is the heroic effort of Natalie Portman to bring together a coherent portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman undone by grief but struggling to keep a family and a legacy together. The best scenes in the film are those in which Jackie, briefly obsessed with the history of American political assassination, waffles between giving JFK a funeral that would rival Abraham Lincoln's and her fears that her husband's assassination might be part of a larger plot. She chooses a grand procession in which she, members of the administration, and foreign dignitaries would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the church. Then, when Lee Harvey Oswald is gunned down, she calls the procession off and rages at her brother-in-law Bobby for having kept the news of Oswald's murder from her while she and her two small children were making a vulnerable public appearance.  But then she changes her mind again, after LBJ's assistant, Jack Valenti, has already informed the foreign dignitaries, including the very difficult Charles De Gaulle, that there will be a motorcade instead of a walk. "I will march with Jack, alone if necessary," she tells Valenti. If the rest of Jackie were as good as these scenes, it would be a major achievement. Unfortunately, it's blurred by an unnecessary frame story in which she is interviewed by a journalist and exercises an iron-willed control over what he will print, even as she spills the most intimate details of her experiences to him -- a way of launching flashbacks. There are too many lugubrious moments, scenes of Jackie wandering alone through the White House. There's also a rather sententious conversation with a priest in which he and Jackie flirt with existentialist concepts of the meaning of life and death -- even John Hurt, in one of his last film appearances, can't quite bring this one off. There's some miscasting, especially Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy, whom he neither looks nor acts like. But throughout it all, Portman skillfully evokes Jackie Kennedy in voice and manner without mimicry. I have to credit the producers for making a film with a powerful lead role for a woman, but Jackie Kennedy was a more interesting person than this segment of her life suggests. I'd like to see a fuller biopic, perhaps a TV miniseries, that takes in her reaction to her husband's well-known infidelities and carries her through the controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis and the rest of the Kennedy tragedies. I'll bet Portman could play the hell out of the rest of Jackie Kennedy's life.

Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre, 2004)

It's a measure of how the discourse on sexual identity has changed over the past 12 years that Stage Beauty, in which it is a central theme, seems now to have missed the mark completely. Billy Crudup, an actor who should be a bigger star than he is, plays Edward Kynaston, an actor in Restoration London who was noted for his work in female roles at a time when such parts were usually still played by boys and men. Kynaston, as the film tells us, was praised by the diarist Samuel Pepys as "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life." As the film begins, he is performing as Desdemona in a production of Othello, and is aided by a dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), who longs to act. After his performance ends, she borrows his wig, clothes, and props, and performs in a local tavern as "Margaret Hughes." When King Charles II (Rupert Everett) lifts the ban on women appearing on stage, Kynaston not only finds his career threatened, but when the king's mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoë Tapper), overhears him fulminating about the inadequacy of actresses, she persuades the king to forbid men from playing women's roles: The king gives as his reason that it encourages "sodomy." Although the actual Kynaston performed male as well as female roles, in the film he is stymied by an inability to act male parts. Eventually, Maria, who is having trouble with her own new career, calls upon Kynaston to coach her in his most famous role, Desdemona, while at the same time teaching him how to act like a man on stage. Together, they appear as Othello and Desdemona and, with a violently naturalistic performance of the death scene, bring down the house. The premise, taken from a play by Jeffrey Hatcher, who also wrote the screenplay, allows for some insight into the nature of gender, but the film never approaches it satisfactorily. Instead, we have a conventional ending that suggests not only that Kynaston and Hughes revolutionized acting with less stylized performance -- something that certainly didn't occur in the classically oriented Restoration theater -- but also that they fell in love. Earlier in the film, Kynaston is shown in a same-sex relationship with George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who leaves him to get married. The film never quite resolves whether Kynaston is gay, bi, sexually fluid, or simply somehow confused by having been celebrated as a beautiful woman. And while it's risky to apply 21st-century psychology to 17th-century sexual mores, Stage Beauty's indifference to historical accuracy seems to demand that it do so. As unsatisfactory a film as it is, Stage Beauty has a few things to recommend it, starting with Crudup's fine performance. Danes is hindered by a screenplay that never concentrates on her character long enough to bring it into focus, but she and Crudup have strong chemistry together. And the supporting cast includes such British acting stalwarts as Everett, Chaplin, Tom Wilkinson, Richard Griffiths, and Edward Fox, as well as Hugh Bonneville, now best known for Downton Abbey, as Pepys. It's startling to see Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, peering out from beneath a Restoration periwig.

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

I gave up on the Mission: Impossible series after the first two installments (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000) partly because they featured the world's most annoying major movie star, but also because they lacked some of the things that made the old TV series so entertaining. One of those things is intelligence, by which I mean not just spycraft but also the application of thought, rather than muscle and firepower, to problem-solving. Another is that the TV show was an ensemble affair, with Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus (and various successors) working together to thwart the bad guys. The films, on the other hand, were very much about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as a James Bond-style one-man band -- no surprise, since Cruise is the producer of the M:I movies. The other members of the Impossible Missions Force were expendable, with the exception of Ving Rhames, who has been the only other constant in the film series. I was persuaded to take another look at the series after I found myself enjoying Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), which made me think that Cruise still had some valid claim to his stardom. And since J.J. Abrams has become maybe the world's most successful producer-writer-director, it also behooved me to check out the first film he directed. Abrams made a laudable effort to restore some of the ensemble work of the TV series, bringing on a team including Rhames, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg, and Laurence Fishburne to flesh out the IMF. It doesn't quite work because Cruise still hogs the film, but there are some good bits from all of the supporting actors, and a nice contribution to IMF lore: the souped-up 3-D printer that churns out one of the famous masks the agents wind up wearing. This time it's a mask of the film's villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and one of the best scenes in the film involves Hoffman playing Cruise playing Hoffman. But there are simply too many climaxes to the movie. I wish some of them had been cut to expand on the film's most enjoyable section, in which the team infiltrates the Vatican to kidnap Davian. I would have liked to see the planning -- the intelligence, if you will -- that went into the scheme. But I liked M:I III more than I expected. I'm told that Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) and Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015) are better, so maybe I'll eventually get around to checking them out.