Jackie (2012)

Directed by: Antoinette Beumer | 100 minutes | comedy, drama | Actors: Carice van Houten, Jelka van Houten, Holly Hunter, Jeroen Spitzenberger, Elise Schaap, Kenneth Miller, Luis Bordonada, Karen M. Hudson, Robyn Reede, Lynda Fazio, Jacob Browne, Edward A. Duran, Jaap Spijkers, Valerie Adams, Hayo Bruins, Michelle Waterson, Howe Gelb, Joe Freeman, Akiko Stacy, Jim Terr, Paul Hoes, Bryan Head, Linda Fazio, Pam Gow, Bradford Fairbanks, Mary Woods, Chad E. Brown

“If you’ve never had a mother, you can’t miss her,” says Sofie (Carice van Houten) right at the beginning of ‘Jackie’. Her somewhat distant message reverberates throughout a film. At the time, Sofie in his thirties was an ambitious magazine editor with a deadline and a stereotypical boss. Twin sister Daan (Jelka van Houten, sister of Carice) is a literally jumpy nanny. The film sisters grew up happily in Amsterdam, under the care of two teddy bears of adoptive fathers (Jaap Spijkers, Paul Hoes). They never knew their biological mother. Then the phone rings: in a poor corner of New Mexico, USA, a hospital is struggling with a rebellious woman who has suffered a complicated fracture of her leg. She has to go to a rehabilitation center, and if her daughters can’t take care of that? No, says Sophie. Yes, says Dan. Daan wins: a road movie is set in motion, with square wheels.

Given the abrupt transition to the US, devoid of any anticipation, the film seems to be siding with Sofie: “I’m not here on vacation,” she reports determinedly. And unlike Zane, she’s not curious about “womb” Jackie (Holly Hunter) either. Now Jackie also makes very little effort to arouse any interest. Sure, she’s a taciturn mystery, hiding in a RV full of trash, but the way Holly Hunter plays her takes your mind off trying to unravel her. When she speaks, her words fall out like lumps of dry earth. Daan eagerly catches every word, but to Sofie it is clear: “Total nutcase, that woman.”
The official purpose of the trip, to deliver Jackie to a rehabilitation center, quickly becomes trivial. A little more topographical information might have helped at least give the journey the appearance of purpose. Now the trip – with Jackie’s camper – quickly degenerates into a rudderless exercise. Don’t the ladies make an inner journey? Daan and Sofie do, they have brought some overdue social maintenance from their cozy little country, so that they can teach each other a lesson inside and outside the camper. Daantje has to cast off her trepidation, and Sofie confronts the wild nature outside her urban paradise: gigantic longhorns, howling coyotes and even a real snake call her to order. But Jackie has been found here as a homeless person, who was found drunk on the street by the sisters: they want to help her up, but real contact is not the intention. (Imagine never getting rid of that nutcase.) Given their history, it’s a perfectly legitimate attitude, but the total lack of chemistry here also makes for lousy drama. The fact that Jackie is their mother will soon be irrelevant (although that fact will be given another twist). “I don’t remember,” mothers brayed at one point, literally with their hands in their hair. You wonder: is that Jackie speaking, or Holly?

After ‘The Happy Housewife’, ‘Jackie’ is the second feature film for which director Antoinette Beumer collaborated with the scriptwriter duo Marnie Blok and Karen van Holst Pellekaan. At best, the result of that collaboration is a somewhat quirky comedy, with Jelka as the dry reporter and Carice as the sarcastic finisher. But no matter how sharply facial expression, timing and intonation of Carice van Houten are attuned to each other (“Is she going to smoke weed?!”), and how touching Jelka’s Daan is: the Van Houten sisters cannot save this film. Even the pictures are disappointing. Antoinette Beumer and her crew traveled all the way to the deep southwest of the US and then chose to film extensively in and around a dark, beat-up camper van. Because that’s where the drama takes place? It depends on how you interpret that word. You could almost interpret it as a sign of artistic impotence that the story regularly resorts to a laptop with a video connection: ‘We don’t know what to do with those three traveling girls, so let’s get help from outside’. By extension, “Jackie” imported a scene almost straight from “Thelma & Louise,” minus its impact. And so in ‘Jackie’ there are more things that tend towards laziness, intentionally or unintentionally: bad pipe jokes, clumsy editing and of course that Oscar winner who delivers a miserable acting performance. Hunter’s climax is the moment her head of hair comes into view, draped very delicately over a tree trunk. An image like from a shampoo ad – meaningless. At the very end, too late, the film opens up somewhat, as if to imagine how differently the twin sisters view themselves, each other and the world around them after this long journey.