Biopics (pt. II)

Jackie

Christine

Greetings and good morrow, my good people, I hope you’re doing well and staying entertained despite the labor day lull in (good) movie releases and the never-ending influx of anxiety-inducing headlines. Here in Austin it’s been a rainy, moody start to September, which doesn’t exactly make for the most vivacious Virgo season. Despite the climate-induced melancholy—political and weather-wise—there’s still a lot of good movies to watch and I am constantly reminded of how I’ve barely made a dent in my unending film watchlist. After last week’s bleak stories told through an upbeat lens, I thought it’d be fun to watch some bleak stories told through a bleak lens, as we indulge in another round of biographical films. Biopics, or biOPics, have only been broached but once on this now four year old blog, and this was all the way back in 2021. I have, of course, watched plenty of biopics on this blog since, like—Monster, Tick Tick…Boom!, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Elvis, House of Gucci, Bernie, Oppenheimer, A Dangerous Method, Silkwood, The Devil Queen, Henry & June, Calamity Jane, and Marie Antoinette—but I wanted to dedicate a night specifically to biopics once again, and unlike last time, I didn’t want this round to focus solely on men. While history loves to commemorate famous and infamous men, it is far more critical and sparse in its representation of women. That’s why, this week, I wanted to do my part to right this wrong and view two biopics centered upon women—women of varying historical prominence and even polarizing public opinions. I was so eager to dive into some cinematic collections of feminine history but then I remembered the cruel and horrific injustices women have been forced to endure throughout time, and are still forced to endure, and I realized that we’d probably be in for quite the bummer this week. I give this trigger warning to myself as well as you, dear reader, because I am often deeply affected by sad stories, and tonight’s selections were nothing short of palpably-devastating. So, yay! Let’s dive in! Up first is a film that I’ve been needing to see since it was released in 2016, that I was reminded of after watching this same director’s other biographical masterpiece Spencer. And my admiration for its leading lady Natalie Portman grows stronger each year, as will my new obsession with Kennedy-descendant Jack Schlossberg, who inadvertently gave me the final push I needed to watch Pablo Larraín’s film Jackie. Jackie transports us to an idyllic beachside home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 1963, just one week after the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, where a reporter (Billy Crudup) has been tasked with interviewing the former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. It’s through this freshly numbed, despondent lens that we learn a bit about Jackie and JFK’s short time in the Whitehouse, and what occurred in the immediate aftermath of this shocking historical event. The entire film is scored with haunting violins and is shrouded in a muted but colorful glow that felt authentically 1960s. Natalie Portman was the perfect person to play Jackie, not because she looked anything like her (so sorry Jackie), but because she can effortlessly slip in and out of poise and discomfort. Portman’s Massachusetts socialite accent was impeccable, albeit a bit similar to her impersonation of Julianne Moore’s character in May December, and she captured this trademark stiff charm that everyone surrounding the Kennedy lineage seems to possess. The film weaves in and out of this interview, the blissful early days of JFK’s presidency, and the jarring immediacy of switching from one presidential family to another. Jackie is steely and shockingly candid with the reporter, completely understanding his morbid desires to nab a play-by-play of Jackie Kennedy’s most traumatizing day, while still refusing to give him exactly what he wants. But as an audience, we are shown the details of this dark day, the blood and brain-speckled pink Chanel suit Jackie wore, the odd placating she receives from Lady Bird Johnson as LBJ was sworn in mere minutes after the event, the gawking and scrutiny and mystery that would forever follow this woman and her family’s legacy. Larraín’s attention to detail and painstaking precision as a director creates an experience that is both lovely and languid, tender and terrifying, numb but nauseating. He is one of few directors that can transform a gloriously stunning setting or person or place in time into something nightmarish but still captivating. History tends to only hit on the highest and lowest points, but Jackie offered equal time to the quiet, unmentioned pain that is inevitable in any grieving process. It gives extra attention to the people in JFK’s life and administration, and how they were directly effected and forever changed by his assassination. Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Richard E. Grant, John Hurt, John Carroll Lynch, and Beth Grant gave equally powerful performances, even Caspar Phillipson—who plays JFK and is alive on screen only once or twice. Larraín combines both meticulously-researched facts as well as speculative fantasies to his biopics, so Jackie may not have been 100% accurate, but I do think certain unknowable factors were very effective to include—regardless of their level of embellishment. Factors like the different noises each bullet made as they struck JFK, Jackie requesting to know specific details of her husband’s murder from the secret servicemen, and the chilling scenes where Jackie lithely wanders the cavernous halls of the Whitehouse like a ghost as she processes it all. Jacqueline Kennedy understandably withdrew herself from the public eye after this tragedy, and since she never wrote a tell-all book, we can only assume her version of bereavement. This film fills in some of the blanks of this brutal story, and offers the opportunity to learn about a significant moment in history through a more personal, visceral lens. I love how Larraín tells this story delicately, and painfully, because grief is delicate and painful. The logistics and planning and bureaucracy required when someone dies, and how much more complicated it is when that person is the president, were agonizing but fascinating to see. Jackie’s obsession with President Lincoln and the widow he left behind made perfect sense. And while the inclusion of blood and guts and blunt conversations could seem ghoulish to some viewers, I feel like this kind of storytelling makes it easier for us to humanize these uncharacterized historical figures. Whether or not Jacqueline Kennedy actually had a dry sense of humor, or if that was just Natalie Portman naturally being funny, is a mystery I enjoy not knowing the answer to, and I did let out a weak laugh when the reporter asked Jackie for advice and she simply said, “Don’t marry the president.” Larraín’s film Spencer is equally heartbreaking, but it manages to have a happier ending than Jackie, and while I enjoyed both of these films, regardless, I don’t think I’ll be watching either of them again. The exact same sentiment is attached to tonight’s next film, an equally tragic but even more twisted and anxiety-inducing experience called Christine. No, I am not referring to the killer car named Christine from Stephen King’s story, but the 2016 Antonio Campos film that portrays the life and final days of a news anchor from the 70s named Christine Chubbuck. Upon googling her name, you’ll learn why she had a movie made about her, but if you care to go on a deeply disturbing ride full of stress and confrontation and despair, I would suggest that you stop reading this and go watch this movie blindly. This description may make it sound like I didn’t enjoy the movie Christine, but I randomly did, and found it to be more uplifting than Jackie, because something’s wrong with me. Christine takes place in Sarasota, Florida, where Christine and her colleagues at Channel 40 are struggling with poor ratings in their second or third-tier market. It’s the 1970s, and the media landscape is rapidly shifting into some salacious, scandalous, gruesome territory, one that Christine’s boss (Tracy Letts) is eager to keep up with. He demands shorter headlines, gorier crime scenes, more sensationalism, and Christine is appalled. Christine has been working tirelessly for years at this station, among others, and desperately wants the respect and air time that she deserves for all of her time-consuming work. She’s an investigative journalist who is constantly out in the field searching for stories, listening to a police scanner to pick up on events just as they occur, but all her boss will let her cover are stories about the local strawberry festival and the neighborhood crazy chicken lady. In her free time, Christine volunteers at a children’s hospital doing sock puppet theater, as well as paying the bills of the apartment that her and her mother (J. Smith Cameron) share. She’s surrounded by careless people at her job like the head anchor, George (Michael C. Hall), the sports anchor, and the weatherman (Timothy Simons), but she does have one friend at work that can sense her deepening depression—a camera lady named Jean (Maria Dizzia.) It was fascinating to see the pre-show Broadway-esque rituals of this news crew, the politics and chaos that is inevitable when creating live television, and how ruthless one must be to get ahead in this business at this point in time (and probably still today.) Because Christine has a conscience and strong morals, it makes sense that she’d be an investigative journalist, but it also makes sense when she becomes severely troubled by her work. It doesn’t help that Christine is plagued by an increasingly-intense pain in her stomach, or the fact that her hippy mother and peers do not seem to understand her, nor do they seem to care about trying to understand her. Any strong-willed, feminist woman that survived this era in America deserves a purple heart because of all of the socially-enforced misogyny and vanity that was rampant at this time. This film is not just a personalized portrait of depression, it is a snapshot of a particularly barbaric moment in American history, and the way the media feeds our grotesque cultural obsessions with death, sex, and humiliation. The third act of this film is one of the most well-paced and stressful climaxes I’ve ever witnessed, and I urge you to watch to the very end of this film even if you already know the final result. Christine does an excellent job of building suspense, of unnerving the audience with its dialogue, musical cues, and gut-wrenching anticipation. Similarly to Jackie, I found that Christine handled its subject matter with as much care and consideration as possible. The shocking event that this film leads up to is never glamorized—even the camera used is a wide-angled lens—which felt appropriately passive but still viscerally frightening. Today, as I type this, there has been another school shooting, continued bombing in Gaza, more death than any news outlet could cover, more tragedy than one world could handle. And the only thing more macabre than the horrors that constantly take place on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute frequency is the flashy, frenetic way that we are alerted to these horrors, both by the news and now by social media. It is all so overwhelming, it is impossible to handle these news stories alone. If only Christine Chubbuck weren’t so isolated and alone, maybe she’d be fine, maybe she’d finally gain the respect she earned, and maybe I’d have nothing to write about this week. But, I digress. This is a powerful movie, one that I'll be thinking about for a long time. After these two heavy-hitting heavy films I really do need to wrap things up and go watch cartoons or something, but I do thank you for reading along and I do hope I didn’t depress you too much. I’ll be signing off for now, with the promise of some happier movies for you next week, dear reader. But for now, good night and good luck.