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54 December 15 • 2016
arts & life
AT THE MOVIES
Opening Friday, Dec. 16: The feature
film Jackie stars Natalie Portman,
35, as Jackie Kennedy. The movie
centers on the most dramatic period
of Jackie's life — the time just before
and after JFK's assassination and the
assassination itself. The national media
reviews have been very good to great,
and it's almost a sure bet that Portman
and others connected with the film
will be Oscar-nominated. If you watch
any trailer, you can see that Portman
has mastered Jackie's distinctive voice
— a mixture of a New York accent,
finishing-school diction and a breathi-
ness that reminds one of Marilyn
Monroe. But Portman's performance
is far more than the voice. Top critic
David Edelstein, 57, says Portman just
nails "Jackie's mix of slyness and shy-
ness."
Max Cassella, 49, co-stars as Jack
Valenti, the LBJ aide who clashed with
Jackie when she insisted that she
would walk in the open streets with
her husband's casket as it was taken to
his funeral.
The screenplay, by Noah
Oppenheim, 38, won the best screen-
play award at the Venice Film Festival.
Oppenheim has a foot in screenwrit-
ing and politics, perfect for this film.
A Harvard grad, where he sometimes
wrote on Jewish issues for the Harvard
Crimson, he went on to produce politi-
cal talk shows like The Chris Matthews
Show and Scarborough County.
Currently, he is senior producer of
The Today Show (he's the guy who
fired Billy Bush). Jackie is his first solo
screenplay, but he has contributed to
the scripts of two recent action films.
Because this film will be in the
news through the awards season, I'll
save some interesting Jewish Jackie-
connection stories and Jackie film nug-
gets for a future column.
Like Jackie, the romantic musical
La La Land has received major kudos
from critics and is an Oscar-contender.
The co-stars, Ryan Gosling and Emma
Stone, had real chemistry in Crazy,
Stupid, Love (2011). When their La La
characters meet, he's a jazz musician
working in dives and she's an aspir-
ing actress/barista trying to survive.
They fall in love, but as they become
successful, that success starts tearing
them apart. Jason Fuchs, 30, whose
father was raised Chasidic, has a sup-
porting role.
The film was written and directed by
Damian Chazelle, who's best known for
Whiplash (2014), whose main character
was Jewish. In 2014, Chazelle told the
Jewish Journal that his parents, liberal
non-practicing Catholics, sent him to
Hebrew school for four years. Chazelle
met Justin Hurwitz, 31, the La La Land
film composer, at Harvard and there
they formed a quite successful rock
band. Hurwitz wrote 15 songs for La La
and some are full production numbers.
The lyrics were written by the song-
writing team of Justin Paul and Benj
Pasek, 31. Pasek, a Philadelphia native,
and Paul, from Connecticut, met at ori-
entation at the University of Michigan.
They quickly hit it off, despite differ-
ent backgrounds. Paul's father is a
Protestant minister and Pasek comes
from a quite religious Jewish home.
They've written several shows togeth-
er, including the Broadway hit musical
version of A Christmas Story.
*
Celebrity Jews
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
Portman in Jackie
Hurwitz
Pasek
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