Jackie (2012, Antoinette Beumer): Netherlands

Reviewed by Mikael Myggen. Viewed at the Metro theater, Santa Barbara Film Festival

“Raised in Amsterdam by a gay couple–”

That’s all of the description I needed to read before I decided that I was going to see this movie. When’s the last time you can say you’ve seen a movie where the main characters had gay parents? I can’t think of any examples at all, and I personally love it when films try to experiment and do things that haven’t been done before.

Jackie is one of the most refreshing movies I’ve seen all year.

It’s a great little movie that knows exactly what kind of experience it wants to deliver, and does it almost perfectly. The premise is that there are these two sisters, Sofie and Daan, who hear that their birth-mother has been found in America, and she needs to be picked up from the hospital right away. The twins travel to the hospital and meet their mom for the first time, but they don’t get the reception that they expected. Jackie, their mom, is a really unlikable person at the start of the movie, but ironically that caused me to like her right away, due to the radical personality difference. She’s uncooperative; almost completely refusing to speak at all, she quickly holes herself up in her RV, and unable to remove Jackie from her vehicle, the twins set out across New Mexico to deliver their mom to a rehab facility.

The movie is basically a road-trip comedy, very much like Little Miss Sunshine. And like that movie, it’s really hard for me to actually find things that Jackie did wrong, so I’m just going to gush about the things it did right for a while. One thing that stands out to me as being especially strong is the script. The writing for Jackie is absolutely top-notch, and very clever. For example, since the twins are from another country, they can talk about Jackie right in front of her without her knowing, which creates lots of comedy and storytelling opportunities. Every line is important and engaging. Even when Jackie isn’t speaking, you’re still learning about what kind of person she is based on her body language alone, and that’s a really hard thing to achieve with a script. Every character is totally believable, and the twins are different enough to be interesting as standalone characters, which is awesome. The character development is also handled really nicely as well, and the pacing is fantastic.

The thing about Jackie is that it wants to put you in a good mood. It really, really wants you to be smiling and laughing through most of the movie. There’s something really moving about seeing these two sisters and their mom interact with each other for the first time. At it’s core, it’s a movie about a mom who was finally given a second chance to raise her children. It’s just impossible to not be smiling like an idiot when you see some of the things these people do together. Of course, the movie would get stale really fast if it was just a feel-good romp all the way through, so there’s several conflicts thrown in to balance things out.

The camerawork isn’t ground-breaking  but it’s certainly good enough to carry the movie along. One nice touch I noticed was that, when the characters get into the RV, the camera comes much closer to their faces, like how you would see someone if you were actually in a car with them. Little stuff like that goes a long way to making the audience feel like a part of the experience, rather than an outsider looking in. Colors are nice and vibrant.

All that being said, there ARE some things that are wrong with the movie. For one, the first 10 minutes it initially feels like there’s something interesting in the movie, but it takes awhile for things to actually get rolling as it stumbles around to explain itself. The movie also seems to be too modest at times, not wanting to shoot for too many goals at once, and just focusing on nailing the main story arc. The movie also comes really close to being corny at times, but most of the time it stops itself. And lastly, the ending twist is very strange, and some people might hate it, but I actually liked it and thought it added to the movie.

If you like feel-good comedies and you’re okay with reading some subtitles, Jackie is absolutely worth checking out. Nearly everything the film tries works, and the writing is funny and convincing.