Jacqueline Kennedy and Christine Chubbuck may not have had much in common in real life – the former briefly the US first lady, the latter a put-upon television news reporter in the early 1970s in Sarasota, Florida – but two new films named after them are cut resolutely from the same cloth. Jackie and Christine are character studies of haunted women in which the claustrophobic close-up and the desolate wide shot are the predominant forms of address.
Both films hinge on fatal gunshots to the head and both seek to express cinematically a state of mind that is internal: grief and loss in Jackie , which is set mainly in the hours and days after the assassination of President John F Kennedy; depression and paranoia in Christine. In this area, they rely heavily not only on hypnotically controlled performances from their lead actors but on music that describes the psychological contours of distress.
Even before we see anything in Jackie , we hear plunging chords like a string section falling down a lift shaft. This is the unmistakable work of the abrasive art rocker Mica Levi. Her score in Jackie closes in on the ears just as the tight compositions by the cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine exclude the majority of the outside world. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín knows a thing or two about sustaining intensity, as viewers of his earlier work, including his Pinochet-era trilogy ( Tony Manero , Post Mortem and No ), will attest. Though this is his first English-language film, there is no hint of any softening. The picture will frustrate anyone hoping for a panoramic historical drama, with Larraín and the screenwriter Noah Oppenheim irising intently in on Jackie, played with brittle calm by Natalie Portman, and finding the nation’s woes reflected in her face.
Bit-players come and go as the film jumbles up the past and present, the personal and political. A journalist (Billy Crudup), nameless but based on Theodore White, arrives to interview the widow. Her social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), urges her on with cheerleading smiles during the shooting of a stiff promotional film intended to present her warmly to the public. Her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard) hovers anxiously nearby as she negotiates the chasm between private grief and public composure. For all the bustle around her, the film insists on Jackie’s aloneness and Portman gives a performance in which there is as much tantalisingly concealed as fearlessly exposed.
A different sort of unravelling occurs in Christine. Antonio Campos’s film begins by showing Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall) seated next to a large box marked “fragile” as she interviews on camera an empty chair in which she imagines Richard Nixon to be sitting. She asks of the invisible president: “Is it paranoia if everyone is indeed coming after you?” It’s a good question and one that she doesn’t have the self-awareness to ask herself. Pressured by her editor to chase juicy stories, she goes to sleep each night with a police scanner blaring in her ears. She pleads with a local cop for stories about the darker side of Sarasota, scarcely comprehending that the real darkness lies primarily within her.
For all the shots of TV monitors displaying multiple images of Christine in this beige 1970s hell, the film doesn’t blame the sensationalist nature of the media for her fractured state. Nor does it attribute her downfall entirely to the era’s sexism. Yet both of those things exacerbated problems that Chubbuck already had. She is rigid and off-putting, all severe straight lines, from her haircut and eyebrows to the crossed arms and tight, unsmiling lips that make it difficult for anyone to get close to her. That the film does break through is down to Hall, who illuminates the pain that Christine can’t express, and to the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. It’s perky enough on the surface but there are cellos sawing away sadly underneath. If you listen hard enough, they’re crying: “Help.”
Some works of art slip into the world so naturally that it feels as though they were there already, waiting for somebody to notice them. Paul McCartney apparently woke up with “Yesterday” in his head and assumed that it was a tune he had heard somewhere before. While reading Homegoing , the debut novel from the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, I wondered whether she had experienced a similar sensation when she came up with the structure for this book. It seems so obvious, once you’ve read it, that it needed to be done, but the right artist had to be ready and Gyasi was the one.
In the first two chapters, we meet Effia and Esi, two sisters in what is now Ghana, in the late 18th century. Effia lives with her father and stepmother in Fanteland. The village chief, keen to build links with the newly arrived British, encourages her family to marry her off to James Collins, the white governor of the slave trading headquarters at Cape Coast Castle. Although she is a “wench” rather than a “wife” (wives are white), Effia has a relatively privileged existence, surrounded by fine furniture and silk hangings. Only now and again, when the wind changes, does she hear the cries from the dungeons, where the “cargo” is kept before shipping. When her son, Quey, is born, he is destined for a British education and a future as a slave trader.
Esi’s life takes a very different course. She is brought up with the girls’ mother, Maame, in the heart of Asanteland. Following a conflict with another tribe, Esi is taken prisoner and sold as a slave, first to the Fante and then to the British. She is kept, unknowingly, beneath her sister’s feet, in the horror of the castle’s dungeons, and raped. By the time she is taken to America on the “Big Boat”, stacked ten-deep with other prisoners, she is pregnant with her daughter, Ness. Later in her life, Ness will remember Esi watching motionless as she was torn away and sold to an Alabama plantation owner. Ness will always miss the “gray rock of her mother’s heart. She would always associate real love with a hardness of spirit.”
Each chapter of the book then tells the story of the succeeding generations, alternating between the Ghana-based descendants of Effia and the American descendants of Esi. The last two chapters, which bring the bloodlines together again, are set in the present day. But while the structure is fantastically strong, it would have been nothing without Gyasi’s ability to bring each character alive.
