Pablo Larraín's JACKIE--interesting but not up to the level of his Neruda--opens nationwide

Natalie Portman certainly gives herself over to the fraught and fragile emotional state of the semi-heroine character she plays in JACKIE, the second of the fantasia-type biopics that director Pablo Larraín has given us within the space of a couple of weeks (his other is Neruda, a tale of Chilean poet/politician Pablo Neruda). Ms Portman, Señor Larraín and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (shown below) have conspired to give us an imagined time in the life of the legendary Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis that takes place during an interview with a journalist some time after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, who was at her side when he was killed in Dallas in November of 1963.

Fantasia this may be -- much of what we see indeed happened, but much also has been "imagined" in terms of the feelings and even the verbiage we hear from the various players in the game of politics, personalities and history that is served up here -- but it is most definitely a warts-and-all fantasia, for in Jackie the movie, Jackie the woman comes off as quite the controlling and entitled player in the charade served up here. Even so, the movie manages to includes a few highly emotional and compelling scenes -- a blood-splattered death tends to serve this purpose well -- along with a few choice and cynical moments of high humor. ("I don't smoke," our Jackie tells that journalist, after we -- and he -- have seen her puffing away on countless cigarettes.)

Jackie controls what is "off" and "on" the record, all right, just as she appears to do in her handling of plans for the funeral cortege for the dead President. We get reams of specifics here in Mr. Oppenheim's screenplay, but most of them turn out to be rather generic, showing or telling things we already know -- if we're old enough to have been around at the time of this national "loss." (That's Peter Sarsgaard, above, an interesting choice to play Bobby Kennedy.)

We're present at the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson (another good choice in John Carroll Lynch, center, right, above, with the great Beth Grant, center left, doing honors as Lady Bird). Among the many flashbacks are those with the local priest (a fine John Hurt) who counsels our heroine with, if not the usual cliches, still a bunch of religious/philosophical musings that will not exactly blow your mind.

We see that famous "White House tour" Jackie took us on via television back in the day (above), and we meet some of her entourage (in particular the very good, as ever, Greta Gerwig). And of course the assassination itself, which we come back to a time or two, to add some pizzazz to the proceedings.

There are lots of outfit changes, too -- the movie is a kind of fashion show of its day -- showing off Ms Portman to fine visual effect (the actress is a good deal more beautiful even than the original Jackie.)

It would appear to be the "interior" life of our heroine that Oppenheim, Larraín and Portman are going after, and they achieve this only to some extent. We're certainly there with Jackie as she flails then focuses, reaches out then pushes away. But all the specifics finally seem to be underscoring the obvious instead of revealing much that is new.

This is never more obvious than in the movie's resolutely pushing of the famous "Camelot" comparison -- which surfaces over and over and then ends the film. The movie is clear about the history/mythmaking goal of this Camelot nonsense. But so what? Unfortunately, it has simply added to that nonsense.

Ms Portman is as good as she is allowed to be. Thank god Larraín is a more subtle director than Darren Aronofsky, who pulled out all the stops and then invented a couple of new ones for Black Swan. Of course that won Portman her Oscar. I suspect that Jackie will prove a little too measured and even a tad too negative to garner Portman a second award. In terms of Larraín's work, this movie does not come up to the level of his Neruda, perhaps because of how deeply and well this Chilean director knows and understands that subject and personage. With Jackie, he seems to be relying more on conventional history, "imagined" though it may be.

In any case, the movie -- from Fox Searchlight and running 100 minutes -- after premiering in New York and Los Angeles a week or so back, opens across the country today, Wednesday, December 21. Here in South Florida you can find it in nearly one dozen theaters. Elsewhere? Sure. Simply click here and, if your local theaters don't pop right up, enter your zip code to find the nearest location.

Poet, politico, man and myth: Pablo Larraín's multi-faceted biopic/fantasy, NERUDA

Older Americans of a progressive slant will be familiar with the Nobel-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, I suspect. But unless they are very familiar with the man's history, much of NERUDA, a new film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose new film Jackie is also currently playing (and will be reviewed here next week), may strike them as surprising and bizarre. That's just fine, however, because -- from what TrustMovies can gather about Larraín's film -- this is indeed a kind of fantasia of what-if? and what-then?

The movie builds off facts, all right -- what we may already know about Neruda's life and art -- and what the screenwriter, Guillermo Calderón (of The Club), does in his very nearly completely invented story, is to wrap it all around a real time in Neruda's life (the 1940s) when he had to go on the run from the anti-Communist Chilean authorities who were (as usual and as a few decades later: remember Pinochet?) in the pocket of their North America "teachers." In filming Calderón's screenplay, Señor Larraín, pictured at right, has given us his most poetic movie so far.

Neruda may move slowly but the tale it spins is strange and gorgeous, witty and ironic, buoyant and sad. In the leading role is an actor who looks remarkably like Neruda himself (at least in some of the extant photos we can access, as the one below), Luis Gnecco (shown at left). Gnecco captures the artist, the politician, and the man equally well, succeeding in making us understand how Neruda was able to concoct the myth that surrounded him via the help of both his friends/fans and even more so with the help of his enemies.

After all, when the right wing calls you a traitor to your country, isn't it rather a badge of honor? Pablo was evidently a man of very healthy appetites, many of which are shown us throughout the movie. And yet it is hard not to love him for his excesses, as much as for his talent and political savvy. But Señor Gnecco shares screen time with a co-star much better known in America and internationally, Gael García Bernal (below), who plays a fictional character named Óscar Peluchonneau, a full-of-himself policeman who is given the job of finding and arresting (or maybe even killing) Neruda.

Óscar also narrates the film, and a more unreliable narrator would be hard to come by. But this is part of what makes the movie so often such fun. The policeman's idea of life and art and his place in it all is far afield from any reality we can see, and as the film marches forward, Óscar's ideas grow funnier but also sadder, even a bit poignant.

Mercedes Morán, a beautiful actress with wonderful access to emotional depths (shown above), plays Neruda's woman, and she's a pleasure to watch in all her scenes. Also in the cast is Larraín regular, Alfredo Castro, in a role small enough that you might miss that notable face.

The movie plays with politics and art, reality and fantasy, storytelling and the "heroic protagonist" (this is the role our Óscar dearly wants to assume) -- all to very good effect. It is beautiful to look at, as well, never more so than in the film's final scenes in the snowy Andes mountains where predator and prey will finally meet. Sort of.

Along the way we get snippets of Neruda's poetry, too, and if I have not made if clear that more than a passing interest in this poet is probably a requirement of the film, then let me do that now. I suspect that Chileans probably flocked to the film in a similar way that Americans will do with Jackie, a north-of-the-border mythmaker in her own way.

Meanwhile, Neruda -- from The Orchard and Participant Media, running 107 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles -- opens tomorrow, Friday, December 16, in New York City at the IFC Center and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal, and in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. In the weeks to come it will hit a number of other cities, too. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates.

The Catholic Church in Chile: Pablo Larraín's masterfully cringe-inducing THE CLUB opens

Here's a film that makes our current Catholic-scandal movie, Spotlight, look practically benign. THE CLUB, the new film from Chilean director/co-writer Pablo Larraín tackles priestly pedophilia in the kind of manner we have not seen previously: utterly raw, angry, take-no-prisoners. Unspooling in a small Chilean seacoast town in a home in which are housed several priests with, shall we say, bad reputations, along with a "nun" (maybe former nun) who takes care of them, from the outset the movie alerts us to the fact this little group has managed to do very well for itself. In fact, the film works quite nicely as a microcosm of The Catholic Church itself -- with all of its power and rewards, hypocrisy and denial offered up in full bloom.

The Club may be the most anti-Catholic movie I have ever seen, and yet its characters also seem very human and real (if pretty bizarre). What they do here, however, is shockingly awful, and the fact that it all works out for the "best" makes it seem even more so. Senor Larrain, shown at left, has given us a tale of Catholic guilt and non-retribution that stands with the best (or is it the worst?) of them. Although we come to understand to some extent the half dozen men, along with the woman who keeps them, as individuals, it is finally the group -- that Club of the title -- that we know best.

This is rather like the Church itself, don't you think? Where all is accomplished to keep the "group" -- the power -- together and going strong, no matter the "sacrifices" that must be made along the way. Here, as with all organized religion, the end justifies the means. Interlopers of any kind (there are three major ones in this movie) must be destroyed or co-opted. Maybe both simultaneously.

How all this is demonstrated by Larraín and his co-writers (Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos) involves everything from small-minded townspeople to greyhound racing, black-market babies to sexual child abuse (performed, of course, in the name of Jesus), military torture to simple blackmail. And all this is woven into the fabric of life experienced by our little beachfront club members.

The movie opens with a bout of that dog racing and then the introduction of a new "priest" into the current group, followed almost immediately by the introduction of the classic "victim" figure, a fellow named Sandokan (a fine Roberto Farías, above), who makes this figure one of the strongest and most original yet seen in the many films about priest pedophilia so far served up.

Then we have another newcomer to the group: an investigator sent from the Vatican to assess the group and decide what to do with them, since pushing defrocked priests off into far-away places and then forgetting about them has now come back to haunt the Church. How our investigator plies his trade and how he, too, is finally used and co-opted proves one of the films darkly comic highlights.

Watching these people play off of and bounce around each other makes for some of the more unsettling, unnerving scenes experienced in cinema over the past few years. Larraín is increasingly masterful at the kind of indirection that shows us how we are all perpetrators and victims. Does this let us off the hook? Hardly. Instead the filmmaker does here for the The Catholic Church what he has done earlier in his films regarding the Pinochet regime in Chile.

The performances are all as bizarre as the subject matter would indicate, and they work individually and together to make the movie as creepily memorable as it ought to be. Organized evil never dies. Particularly when it comes from organized religion.

The Club, from Music Box Films and running a mere 97 minutes, opens this Friday in New York City (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Landmark Sunshine Cinema), and on Friday, February 12 in Los Angeles (at Landmark's NuArt) and in Southern Florida at the O Cinema Miami Beach, the Tower Theater Miami and the Silverspot in Naples, and then on February 19 here in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters. Click here -- and then click on THEATERS -- to see all currently scheduled playdates across the country.

Pablo Larraín's POST MORTEM gives us Chile's Allende from an unusual angle

You couldn't ask for a more bizarre, nor more reflective image of Augusto Pinochet's take-over of Chile than the one Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín gives us in his new film, POST MORTEM. That image is simply one of bodies piling up over the floors, stairs, hallways -- everywhere -- in the morgue of Santiago. We've seen the attack on the Capitol per The Battle for Chile, and the horrors of the amphitheater in It's Raining on Santiago, but something as after-the-fact and mundane as the goings-on at a morgue is as much deadpan as dead. Whether all this happened as shown -- or was less obvious, or maybe much worse -- is beside the point. The images you'll take away, once you've seen this movie, will probably prove indelible. The movie itself? Not so much.

On the basis of the two films TrustMovies has seen by Señor Larraín -- Tony Manero and Post Mortem -- he'd say this filmmaker has a gift for dark juxtaposition: the homage to John Tavolta's character coupled to serial killing in TM, and now the military coup's capture and killing of its enemies reduced to a literal autopsy in PM. Larraín (shown at right) also understands how to take one of his country's seminal events -- the overthrow of the democratically-elected regime of Salvador Allende -- and view it from a sidelong glance so that it appears, on one level, less important than the story at hand, while at the same time exerting enormous force on everything from characters to events. He is also very good at showing us how adept was Chile's citizenry at ignoring or seeming to ignore what was going on all around it. (There's one hell of a great image in this film that makes both literal and symbolic the enormous repression of people, actions and ideas under Pinochet.

The problem, then? There's maybe 30 minutes of content here, attenuated to fill the film's more than hour-and-one-half running time. (This was true of Tony Manero, too.) That the attenuation is handled stylishly is helpful, but eventually it cannot disguise the paucity of event or the needless repetition in which the filmmaker indulges.

So many shots are held for so long -- hey, you want to know how to cook an egg?! -- that you may finally give in to your wish to yell "Cut!" aloud in the theater. There's a crying jag offered up by first one and then another character that lasts long enough to have you scratching your head to locate a purpose for its length -- other then, Gee, these actors sure know how to sob! And finally we have that repression/suppression scene, in which so many pieces of furniture are moved into place that you want to scream, "We get it. We get it, OK?"

Taking the leading role, as he did as well in Tony Manero, Alfredo Castro (above left, and further above) proves again that he can hold attention by virtue of his marvelously odd face alone. He does little emoting (other than that crying jag) but manages to sleepwalk through life, much in the way that Larraín seems to be telling us that Chile's population once did. As his odd lady love, who works and then gets booted from what passes for the low-end Chilean version of the Folies Bergère, Antonia Zegers (above right, and below) provides the emoting that's missing from Mr. Castro. They make a fine and interestingly mismatched pair.

Post-Mortem, from Kino Lorber, 98 minutes, opens this Wednesday, April 11, in New York City at Film Forum. Click here to view any upcoming, currently-scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.